It was a cool summer Saturday morning and I was riding my bike in circles on the driveway. I waved to Bart across the road as he disappeared into his garage.
   Bart pedaled across the road and called out, “I have a great plan.”
   “Does it include those shovels you have?”
   Bart dismounted and handed me one. “Yup, sure does. We’re gonna dig for gold.”
   “Neat. Where?”
   Bart mounted his bicycle and said, “Follow me, time’s awastin’.”
   We didn’t have a baseball game so the day was open. I pedaled up beside Bart and asked again, “Where are we digging?”
   “You know the new house going up on the way to the park?” Bart asked.
   I thought for a minute and it came to me. “The one that looks like it’s on two lots?”
   We stopped at a road to let the traffic pass. “Yeah. There’s a huge pile of dirt there.”
   “Can we dig there? Isn’t it someone’s house?”
   Bart turned to me and said, “Not yet, it’s not.”
   The traffic cleared and Bart pushed off. I was a little skeptical about the dig, but pedaled fast so to keep up with Bart.
   We arrived at the dig site and parked our bikes.
   “Isn’t that a great pile of dirt?” asked Bart.
   I had to admit it was a pretty big pile. “Think there are any rubies with the gold?”
   “I dunno. They’re red and shiny, right?”
   “Yup, my mom likes them. She likes the one your mom wears.”
   “That’s right. She wears it when Dad’s traveling. She got it from someone.”
   “Well, my mom thinks it’s pretty. Maybe I’ll find one for her.”
   Bart walked toward the pile. “Grab your shovel and let’s dig.”
   “Where?”
   “I dunno. I’m gonna start about half way up.”
   “Bart, how big are the gold nuggets? The size of a marble?”
   “Yeah, that’d be a good one.”
   Bart knew what he was doing so I started digging near him on the pile.
   We dug for a while. Good thing it was a cool morning because digging for gold was hard work.
   “Hey!” I yelled throwing up my hand. “Watch it. You nailed me with that shovelful.”
   Bart put his shovel down. “Sorry. It’s just that I thought we’d have found lots of gold already.”
   “Oh, it’s okay. I haven’t found any either.” I put my shovel across my knees and sat on the dirt pile. “No rubies either.”
  Bart jabbed his shovel into the dirt pile and sat next to me. “Dirt and rocks, is all.”
   “Yeah, I found a mess of little broken rocks. Really tiny pieces. See?”
   Bart bent over to look. “Where?”
   “Here, by my foot. Can’t you see them?
   “Oh, the little chips? I’ve seen a mess of them, too.”
   I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard, “Morning, boys.”
   Bart hopped up and brushed off the seat of his pants and said, “Hi.”
   A tall man smiled and asked, “What are you boys doing?”
   I tried to make myself smaller and hoped we weren’t in trouble.
   Bart climbed down the hill to meet the man. “We’re digging for gold.”
   “Gold, huh? Find any?”
   Bart shook his head. “Nope. No rubies either.”
   The man smiled, revealing very white teeth. “No rubies either?”
   “Nah, mostly rocks and dirt and piles of chips.”
   The man cocked his head. “Chips?”
   Bart motioned to me and I picked up a handful of the chips and brought them down. I held them out in my hand.
   The man studied them and asked, “Lots of these?”
   Bart shrugged his shoulders.
   The man walked over to the pile and pawed in the dirt. Me and Bart looked at each other, shook our heads, then watched as the man picked something up from the pile.
   He carried it over and handed it to Bart.
   “This is a Native American arrowhead. It’s made of flint. Native Americans chipped off those pieces while making an arrowhead. That’s a good find, boys.”
   “It’s not gold,” Bart said.
   “Or rubies,” I chimed in.
   “Maybe not, but valuable nonetheless. I’m Mr. Wiley. I own this pile of dirt and the soon-to-be-finished house.”
   I looked at Bart. I didn’t like where this was heading.
   Bart looked Mr. Wiley square in the eye. “There wasn’t a sign saying we couldn’t dig in the dirt pile.”
   I took a half step back. “Are we in trouble?” I asked. “We didn’t mean to hurt anything, we were just digging for gold and rubies. You can have the arrowhead.”
   Mr. Wiley laughed. “You boys are just fine. I remember loving to dig in dirt piles when I was about your age.” He gestured for us to come closer. “I have deal for you. You two, but no one else, can dig in the dirt here. You can keep the arrowheads you find. But…”
   Bart straightened up and I took another step back.
   Mr. Wiley threw his head back and laughed. “What a pair of pistols you two are! As I was saying, you can keep the arrowheads you find, but I’d like to see them. That’s all.”
   “Really?” Bart asked.
   “Yup, that’s all. When I move into the finished house, you two come over and we’ll set a time for you, your parents, and your arrowheads to visit. Deal?”
   “Deal,” Bart said.
   I nodded.
   Mr. Wiley stepped away and said, “I just stopped by to check on the progress of the house. You two carry on.” He waved to us as he walked back to his car.
   I stood there wondering what happened.
   Bart turned toward the pile. “Arrowheads. Cool. Let’s get digging.”
 
   We found one more arrowhead that day. The next day we found another. We dug for the next five days and when we were about to give up, we found our fourth arrowhead. The day after that, a bulldozer arrived and spread the dirt around in preparation for a lawn.
   I kept all the arrowheads in my coin collection box under my bed for safekeeping. My mom was pretty impressed with the arrowhead collection and she agreed to meet Mr. Wiley.   
   All in all, it was a good day, four arrowheads were safe, and who knows, there is always tomorrow.
 

​‘My, what is it with you?’ Lucille once asked him. ‘You waiting for something French to happen?’ Lucille said that kind of thing. It made no sense, not to Bud. He just let it pass. No point in arguing with Lucille. No point in arguing with anybody. Let the world go on moving round the sun. Folks could say this and maybe that, but all the while Bud had his dreams. They were most important to him. They were real. He was floating through clouds, clutching rainbows, and feeling a shower of stars fall on his bemused head. When he looked out of the window, as he often did, Bud saw what nobody ever could guess was happening to him. Something French? Well, maybe.
Bud’s dream was of flying. The first time he flew he was so young, a child of seven years. Early one morning he leapt effortlessly, naturally, gracefully from the garden wall into the air. It was the time of his life, soaring and swooping over the rooftops and the trees, then high into the clouds. It did not seem at all unusual. Surely at some point in their lives everyone can fly? In Bud’s case it was one morning a little before the waking call from his mother when he was seven. Then, without warning it was time for school. There would be no more flying.
Bud stayed close to his dream. He would watch the motion of birds in flight. He watched the planes that flew on their way to distant cities they could reach in the time he could write for Miss McMaster about the boy who could fly as easily as a fish can swim.
He liked movies about birds and also about planes. In Flying Down to Rio, seen on TV the summer he was thirteen, the sight of the showgirls dancing on the wings of the plane thrilled him because he imagined that when he was a little older, eighteen maybe, he was going to see such spectacles for himself. This would be happening all the time, like shoot-outs between cops and hoodlums at the D-Lite grocery store. If he drank with fellow cavalry officers he would casually toss his glass into the fireside. Then there would be the time he had to jump from the car that was about to plunge over the cliff. Then there would be the time the flight attendant asked, ‘Is there anyone here who knows how to fly a plane?’
Actually, when it came to doing it for real Bud was not a good flier. Planes made him nervous. He did not dare look down at the ground below as the craft rose so swiftly into the air. He was happier in the clouds. Their soft cushioning look gave him the illusion of safety. He always listened carefully to the attendant’s instructions. It comforted him to think that if the plane landed on water, when he was floating in the water the light in his hand would attract the attention of the rescue party. With such thoughts he whiled away the hours of flight, drifting gradually into some dream of showgirls and dare-devil aeronauts. This was the Bud that nobody really knew.
A better marriage might have made the vital difference. But Lucille wasn’t one for flying. There was a time when Bud tried to tell her of his plans, ambitions and hopes.
Yes, they were hopes that dwarfed the skyline of theirs and anybody’s city. But Bud had serious ambitions then. He had talent. He knew he had. High school hadn’t brought out the best in him because of all the jerks. And the job in insurance was for the little guys. Someday the profile would read ‘There was a time when he was just another insurance salesman cold-calling in wealthy neighbourhoods until the day the door opened and…’
That day was not yet. The years were passing, but nobody was going to open the door unless, of course, he opened it for himself.  He suggested they move to somewhere different, somewhere with more opportunities. He suggested Los Angeles, but Lucille just laughed.  The vision of Bud staring out at Hollywood homes was Bud all the way through. ‘Leopards don’t change,’ was all Lucille would say in response. Bud could think only of a balloon escaping from his hand, and disappearing into the kingdom of the lucky.
Some afternoons, if he had completed his quota for the day, Bud would slip into a movie house downtown. He knew where all of them were. He avoided places where he thought there may be somebody who would see him and tell Lucille. She did not share her husband’s need for some entertainment that life could not provide. Busying herself about the house, Lucille could avoid Bud, dozing on the couch, mouth open with peculiar sounds, and eyes closed.
One day there was a movie of a kind Bud did not usually see. It was foreign. Foreign meant difficult and strange, with no action, and with words you had to read at the bottom of the screen. He did not see the point of them. He supposed that crazies and retards watched them because they knew no better. What Bud liked was a good movie.
This movie turned out to be interesting once you got over the lack of color. At least nobody spoke. It was all motion and music, like the old silent days, classic days of an ancient time, a Roman and Greek and Egyptian time. Bud never understood why there was no color then. He had heard it said that back then there was not the spectrum of color that there is now.
It was a bleak world that Bud feared he might stumble into accidentally one day. Let us suppose he turned a corner, only to find himself in an unfamiliar street. When he looked back the alley he had walked down was no more. There was no way of return.  Fearing that might happen, Bud did not like movies that were not in a world he knew.
But this was different.
It was French.  He could tell that by the shots of the Eiffel Tower. Also there was a man in a beret. And guys sat at sidewalk tables drinking wine. The Continentals did that. They did it a lot because their sports and movies weren’t so good.
So why did Bud like this movie so much? Well, there was the man selling balloons in the park. The boy buys all the balloons, only to find he cannot keep his feet on the ground. He rises and falls. Then the wind starts to blow so that newspapers and hats are scattered, the boy rises higher and higher into the sky above Paris. He is gliding gently, taken by whatever current blows, for he cannot really steer. He tries putting one hand out, but he changes course only a little. So he lets the balloons take him where they will. He is free. The boy looks happy. Bud remembered what such a feeling was.
The problem was, as always, that Lucille did not remember. She could not have had the faintest notion of what Bud was trying to say if he had told her about the movie he saw. Some sardonic remark was going to be all he would hear. And so Bud did not tell Lucille of the beautiful experience he had had that afternoon. ‘How was my day? Oh, you know…’ She did not and would never know.
Maybe the less she knows… Bud thought. If she tried to understand. But how could Lucille, so practically-minded, make sense of something French with balloons? It wasn’t about something she knew.  It was something Bud knew.
Bud knew that what he had seen was true.  There was a city called Paris, which was French. If there he could find a man who sold balloons in a park, then he, too, might glide over the boulevards and cafes where marmzelles in silk skirts would blow kisses as Bud, the hero, passed overhead on his way to…wherever  his flight would take him. This, he thought, was something he had to do at last. One day it was going to be too late. Until then it was never too late.
The clock on the City Hall struck the hour. Bud as a boy had wondered what would happen if he dared climb the tower and changed the time of the clock. Would people walk backwards, repeating all they had done in reverse? Would the world be thrown into chaos? Would a great hurricane blow, and whirlwind spin? Would day become night? Would gravity vanish so that everyone rose up towards the sun? Was that what would happen? Wasn’t there a movie about that? It would make a great movie. Bud used to have ideas like that all the time.
Well, now it was time to live out some of those ideas. He used to say he would. He no longer said it out loud. But inside his head Bud was the same dreamer who had been known to fly. He foresaw the grins and snickers, the shaking of heads when they heard what Bud had gone and done. But he also foresaw the tickertape welcome home.
Or, if that was expecting a little too much of envious people, there would be Lucille, yellow-ribboned, greeting him off the bus and walking home with him, arm in arm. ‘You were always my hero, Bud. I just knew you could do it really.’ The nagging and the snorts were not the Lucille that was deep inside her. At heart she loved him. She would love for sure the man she was going to see in a new light when he came.
So why had it taken so long for the Bud that nobody knew to strike out as the Bud everybody loved? Well, there had obstacles and obligations. They grounded a person.
They weighed you down. When Bud was a boy he visited a home that had a bird in a cage. He felt so much sorrow for that bird. He wondered at the cruelty of people who could imprison such a creature for their own pleasure. They were thinking only of themselves, whereas Bud was thinking about freedom and the right of a beautiful, harmless creature to live a natural life.
‘They would put me in jail,’ he thought, ‘if they wanted to.’ Bars on the window always made him uneasy. Even the metal fence outside the school was something he would have liked to tear down.  It was when he thought of that fence, and the thought of other walls and locked doors that finally impelled Bud to make his escape.
It was easily done, telling Lucille that he was going hunting with a few of the guys. She didn’t seem to think it strange that Bud possessed no gun, and that he had never been hunting. He was not an outdoor person at all. ‘I need to find the real me,’ he told Lucille. ‘Well, she said in reply, ‘there’s a man in there somewhere, I guess.’  She expected him back in three or four days.
Bud a choice that was no choice. He had to fly. And so he took flight to Paris, the city of many movies he found unforgettable because they were about Paris. The name itself evoked images of a charm and style that Silverwood City never had even in the finest weather when a guy felt lucky. A guy was lucky in Paris whatever the season.
Bud knew this was to be the movie part of his life, a starring role in a picture for which he would be remembered if only by himself alone.
‘I always wanted to see Paris,’ said a short, fat man from Milwaukee, ‘ever since I saw Tony Curtis in Wild and Wonderful.’ ‘Well, for me it was Gene Kelly,’ a sweet lady from Philadelphia replied. ‘And to think,’ a tall, pale schoolteacher from South Carolina added, ‘we’ll be seeing the famed cathedral of Notre-Dame as immortalized by Charles Laughton in that great classic movie, the one about the hunchback.’ Bud heard all these testimonies with some interest. He felt, perhaps, he was among friends. But when he mentioned the balloons nobody was listening. Not a word was said. Somebody changed the subject, saying, ‘I don’t remember Tony Curtis in a Paris movie. Was that before or after Spartacus?’
The plane began its descent through the French clouds. Bud opened his eyes to see the pelican that flew by. At first glance it was another plane. But then he saw it was a bird. It was not quite a like the creatures you see flying. It had a look about i. Pelicans do not have so much intelligence and personality in them, he felt sure. They were birds. They flew. There was not much more to them, except in a pelican’s case an enormous beak.
Bud was puzzled by what he saw. On the other hand he was in the air above Paris. They did things a little differently there. That was why he had come across an ocean. If he found himself in a Paris that wasn’t Paris he would be disappointed. He was not going to be disappointed. The sassy grin and wave from the pelican told him that this was going to be a great movie.
And so it was no surprise when he saw the friendly pelican again. He had hoped they might see each other. It was to be expected that at the Eiffel Tower something French would happen. It did when the pelican landed and introduced himself.  ‘Monsieur, I ask have you seen Zouzou?’ the pelican said in a clear but slightly anxious tone. ‘Beret and striped jersey and pencil skirt? She was here, but my fear is that she has fallen.’
‘Pardon me, but do you play the accordion you have there?’  Bud asked. The pelican shot an affronted look at the hapless Bud. ‘Of course. It is how I make my living. Zouzou sings, and I accompany her. I have a good singing voice myself, you understand, but I prefer to play my accordion.’ At that moment Zouzou, looking as the pelican had described, came floating down, followed by a gendarme who floated not nearly so gracefully. He seemed flustered by the indignity of his experience. ‘This charming young lady fell, and I tried to save her,’ the gendarme explained. Bud saw. He had hoped that something French would happen. Something French was happening. If the folks back home could see him now…
But weren’t they watching back home?  This was the kind of movie that Bud had been waiting for. They were lots of guys like Bud, spending their lives waiting for something French to happen. Now Bud was the lucky guy who found that it was happening to him, floating through the Parisian sky, following Zouzou the chanteuse, her pelican accordion-player and the gendarme who had attempted to rescue the marmzelle.
‘Just follow me, m’sieur,’ said the pelican. Although it seemed natural, Bud did not know until then that he could fly like a pelican. Something he had always dreamed might happen was happening. These things happened in movies about Paris. As he once said to Lucille, ‘It ain’t just about popcorn.’ She just gave him one of her looks. She was very good at giving those looks.
Now Lucille was far away. Bud could worry about explanations to her later. For the moment they had to find Zouzou before it was too late. Soon in their descent the pelican and he found her. ‘I lost my balance,’ she said. ‘I thought I saw someone I once knew.’ Her voice was wistful, almost sad when she spoke. ‘Someone who owes you money, huh?’ the pelican suggested, but Zouzou was drifting through memories and regrets, and she heard nothing of the accordion-player’s worldly wisdom. He knew a thing or two. She knew different things. Bud thought it was a very moving scene, one that needed a little music to make it perfect.
‘Sometimes it’s very good just to let the mind float a little,’ Bud said, his voice, also, becoming dreamy. He saw nothing now but wisps of something fine that could have been cotton, or it could have been candy floss, though they were not sticky. They were like fine, spring rain. They were clouds, for no longer was he falling: he was rising. And he was rising so high, following Zouzou, the gendarme and the crazy pelican. Bud supposed it was the instinct for survival, like the war hero he would have been but for that medical examination.
Bud no longer cared what the people back home thought of this. For once – just once – he had nobody to consider except himself. There was nobody - nobody except of course his new friends who were teaching him how to follow his dreams. It was easier when there was no Lucille to wake him.
Before too long they had left the clouds behind. The gendarme said, ‘I am here to ensure there is no breach of the regulations. The law is very strict on matters of dreaming.’ All Bud knew about the law was that it was very strict on just about everything. ‘Therefore,’ the gendarme asked, ‘I must ask you, m’sieur, do you have a licence to dream?’
‘Listen, Pierre…’
‘My name is Jacques-Henri Villeneuve-Dumesnil.’
‘That’s really too bad,’ Bud sincerely commiserated. ‘You could change it. Lots of movie stars do that. I got a book back home…’
‘I have heard enough,’ said Jacques-Henri Villeneuve-Dumesnil. ‘I am affronted by your impudence. I shall arrest you here among the clouds, escort you safely to earth, and there have you guillotined as an example.’
‘I thought,’ Bud reflected sadly, ‘I was on the road to freedom. But I guess guys like me just don’t get the breaks.’
And so Bud’s French movie moved to its close. Bud always knew when a movie was about to finish. Sometimes there was a kiss. Sometimes there was a shoot-out. All that remained was a falling baguette which fell unexpectedly on Jacques-Henri’s head. Helmeted, he had protection from the worst effects of projected missiles, but the baguette of stale, hard bread caused the gendarme’s helmet to fall over his eyes. Jacques-Henri was flying blind, his body swooping and spinning until he was out of sight, lost in the candy-floss.
‘O- la! la!’ the pelican exclaimed, ‘That was fortunate for you, m’sieur. But don’t worry about him. He’ll wake up on solid ground as if nothing had happened. And we, m’sieur, shall fly to the moon.’
‘Sounds good,’ Bud agreed. ‘And if it’s good enough you and Zouzou I guess it’s fine by me.’
When Bud was a boy he dreamed of flying to the moon. He was not the first, of course, but nobody had flown there the way he was going to fly there, the way he was flying now. There was no contact with earth, nothing to remind him that he was an insurance salesman from Silverwood City, nothing to deny him the dream of being the guy who simply flew to the moon because he wanted to do it. He wanted to do it, and he had the right contacts. That’s what a guy needs to get the breaks. Well, with Zouzou and her pelican friend….
Bud looked about him, and all he could see were stars in the darkness. He called out their names, but heard nothing in reply. There was no sign of the moon, nor of earth. Bud was somewhere in the depths of space, floating. It was among the fears he had as a boy that he might find himself out there. Now he was there. Moments before it had been interesting and fun. He had made friends with some unusual people. But they had deserted him, just as he had deserted Lucille and all the people he knew back home. He had no home. Lost in the Universe, that was to be the ultimate experience of his life. A guy like Bud just doesn’t get the breaks.
Or so he thought. But a guy’s luck can change. And there came the sound of an accordion from far away. It was so faint that wonderful sound that told him he was not alone. He could hear something French happening. And he heard familiar voices calling out to him. ‘Come down, M’sieur Bud,’ they cried from below.
When Bud looked down he saw clouds. And through the clouds something metallic shining. Slowly he floated down, following the voices to the tower where he could gently land. It wasn’t over. That was the interval, a time to buy more popcorn, a time to allow all those images sink into his memory.
It was dawn over the city. The views of Paris were overwhelming. ‘This is better than anything,’ Bud gasped. ‘I mean, it’s just so real. So real it’s like a movie.’ Bud was lost for words. ‘When words escape,’ said the pelican, ‘then it is time to sing.’
‘Yeah, I like musicals. Guys in tuxedos. Dames in high heels. You can’t beat those musicals. Like Gigi. I guess that’s one you Frenchies like as much as we do.’
But the pelican was not listening. He broke into song. It was not the kind of tune Bud actually liked, for it was more of a wail than a melody. But it reassured Bud that he was not lost in the stars f or ever.
‘Regard this I implore you,’ Zouzou cried. ‘See what a world is there for us. A world of liberty for which I am prepared to fight, a world for which my friend Raymond the pelican is prepared to die on my behalf, should the need arise.’
‘Should the need arise,’ the pelican agreed, rather mutedly. Perhaps it was the hour of the morning that had curbed his enthusiasm, whereas for Zouzou this new day was the dawn of a glorious new opportunity. ‘This, my friends, is what we have sacrificed so much for. This is liberty. This is this the hour of liberty. We shall be from this moment forward free for ever.’
‘Sounds pretty good to me,’ Bud agreed. ‘I just wish it could be real. Really real.’
‘Ah, my friend, you can make it come true,’ Zouzou insisted.
‘Well, I’d like to think so, but, you see, there’s Blanche back home in the States.’ No sooner had Bud spoken than there was heard a familiar, somewhat raucous voice he thought he might never hear again. It was a voice from Silverwood City. It was a voice that had once purred in Bud’s impressionable, innocent ear. It was the voice of all that he supposed was lost in this beautiful dream. It was the voice of Lucille coming ever closer through the sky.
‘Hi, y’all,’ Lucille shouted as she floated down in the arms of Jacques-Henri Villeneuve-Dumesnil of the Paris Gendarmerie. ‘Look what I’ve found. I mean, there I was at home – alone – when out of the sky fell this adorable little cutesie into the pool I was about to throw myself into it when I learned the truth about the rat I had the misfortune to marry when I was a sweet young maid who had never been kissed except when there were soldiers in town. I was always dependent on the kindness of soldiers until someone came to the house selling insurance and dispensing what I thought was love.’
‘She pounced on me,’ said Bud. ‘I didn’t know what was happening, not even when the preacher held the shotgun to my head. It all happened so fast.’
‘It was so that I might please my Daddy before he died. I said, “Daddy, I have found love”. All Daddy could do was shake his head. But I paid no heed, having fallen instantly in love for the first time that day.’
‘Lucille, honey, I can explain…’
‘There’s no need to explain, Bud, for I have found something that no insurance man could give me. And what I have found is, like, a connection. I have never felt a connection before. Now I have found it with Jacques-Henri. He saved my life.’
‘But, Lucille, this is my movie! Maybe I’ll wake up soon. I’ll find my head on my pillow in our home in Silverwood City. And all this I’ll forget as soon as I hear the alarm. Well, that’s how things should turn out, I guess.’
‘This sure ain’t no dream, Bud,’ Lucille insisted. ‘I do declare. You think I’d be in one of your dreams?  Well, my, that’s just not right, Bud.’
‘So what’s happening to us, Lucille, baby?’
‘Well, pour moi, it is love.’
This surprised Bud. It surprised him a lot. He just did not associate Lucille with love. Love was about wild excitations, whereas Lucille always had seemed more the homemaker. Lucille always had been proud of her home, and pleased to be living in Silverwood City, a regular kind of place in the greatest country on earth. Lucille had never seemed the roving type.
On the other hand, Lucille was a French name. It was possible that she had heard the call from far away. Something had spoken to her in her mind. It must have been too powerful for Lucille (and, boy, was she strong) to resist its temptation. Bud had never been able to tempt Lucille, not once. Where he, the little guy from no place, had failed, something French had drawn her in.
‘You know,’ Bud remarked with a laugh in his voice, ‘in years to come, honey, you and I will be able to say “Well, we’ll always have Paris.” What you say?’
‘I say who’s the “we”?’
‘Honey.’
‘Bud, one day maybe you’ll understand. Or maybe not.’
‘I guess it’s about love,’ Bud said. ‘Here we are in the city where people fall in love like they never do back home. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? To fall in love before it’s too late. Me, I just love Paris. And maybe I’ll soon be back in Silverwood City, but I’ll always have this, and it won’t just be a dream.’
‘Something like that, Bud.’
‘Is there no love in America?’ Zouzou asked.
‘Not much,’ Bud replied.
‘I declare that is not true, Bud,’ Lucille protested. ‘When I was young I had some handsome beaux. I was the belle of my home town. I had the prettiest curls and the daintiest smiles.’
‘Lucille was different in those days,’ Bud explained. ‘We all were. But Lucille was real different. Yeah, there was love in America once.’
‘O-la-la,’ Zouzou declared, ‘now it is France, yes?’
‘I guess.’
‘Then, M’sieur Bud, you must stay. You can make things happen. Like this. It is you, is it not?’
‘Yeah, it’s me, all right. But, honest, I didn’t know what I was doing. I just thought that something a little French maybe. I didn’t expect anything serious to happen. Now it has. And the little guy from Silverwood City wakes up in Paris. And it’s my doing. I’m sorry.’
‘Please, do not apologize. It has been fun, n’est-ce pas?’
‘Sure has. That’s true. It’s been fun. Something French. Just what I wanted. Wait till I tell them back home. But I can’t, can I? I can’t say a word. No, I go home and say nothing.’
‘Then, M’sieur Bud, stay here in Paris and you can do everything.’
‘I do declare,’ Lucille interrupted, ‘Don’t I get a say in this, may I ask?’
‘Madame,’ the pelican explained, ‘it is simple: you have found love with your gendarme, Monsieur gets to remain here in the city of his dreams. C’est tout.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Whatever will they say in Silverwood City?’
‘It is no concern now, madame. You have fulfilled your destiny. For some it is to fight for France in the Legion. For others it is to play the accordion. And for some it is to dance the can-can. You, if I may say, madame, seem the heroic type. Perhaps only the Legion can satisfy the innermost yearnings of your beating heart.’
‘My, such sweet words I never thought I would hear again after poor Daddy passed away,’ Lucille replied, hurrying at last towards her gendarme.
‘Well, that just about wraps things up, I guess,’ Bud said. ‘My destiny is here for sure. I’m through with insurance. I’m through playing poker every Friday with a bunch of jerks who hate me. I’m through with living in a neighborhood where I’m the guy from the wrong side of the tracks. I’m through with watching movies in place of living the life I want. I’m through with everything except the boulevards of Paris.’
The pelican pulled out an enormous handkerchief to wipe a tear from his eyes. He explained that such moments as this always made him a little sentimental.
It was Zouzou who broke the mood of delicate sadness when she took the pelican’s beak in her arms and kissed it. Something she had never done before. And at once there was an explosion that made everybody gasp. The pelican, to general amazement, was no more. An enormous cloud of smoke took his place.
Then through that cloud appeared a young man the sight of whom made Zouzou shriek, ‘Jean-Claude! Is it possible? Can this really be you? No matter, for we are together again, and now we will never be apart.’ So saying, Zouzou embraced Jean-Claude whose return was a dream come true.
Everyone applauded. ‘Something French,’ Bud murmured, ‘Something French.’
And in the distance an accordion played as the Eiffel Tower came into view. It seemed to approach closer and closer, like a great beast that might leap up at any moment. There was no escaping the fact that this was the best movie a guy could ever see.
 

​            I met Ty about a half hour after my parents dropped me off at college.  He came to my dorm room to introduce himself, though I didn’t know this for five minutes, because his roomie blocked him while he bragged about his sports prowess and uncle’s tech company.  
            Flipper failed to even mention Ty during his soliloquy.  I only got to see the stick figure when the large, puffy dude retreated so he could repeat his story to the inhabitants of the next room.  
            “Van.  Jackson.”  My roommate first pointed at me, then himself.
            Ty took a few steps towards us but his spindly legs soon buckled, and he tumbled into me.  His head landed in my lap while I sat on my bed.
            “Ta-da.”  Ty jumped to his feet and offered us a magician’s bow before bouncing out of our room.
            I vowed to stay away from that clowning kid.  My goal that first day, and for most of the next four years, was to meet and be with as many women as I could.  I didn’t see how spending time with Ty would assist me in my pursuit.
            I soon realized I underestimated Ty’s ability to make me and most others laugh and the positive influence that has.  People love a certain kind of madness.  At least until the joker crosses the line.  People can argue about where that line should be drawn, but there’s always a line.
           
           
            Freshman year, Ty directed a lot of his pranks towards our fellow dorm residents who went to bed early, which, for us, was any time before midnight.  Sometimes he’d start lightly tapping on their door.  Just enough to wake the kid from his sleep, but not enough to cause him to answer.  He’d increase the knocking as the minutes passed to let the person know he wasn’t going away.  Then, after they announced they knew it was him and weren’t getting out of bed, he’d start pounding until they finally relented and opened the door.
            “What?”  The sleepy eyed guy would eventually meet Ty in boxers and a t-shirt. 
            “What are they serving for breakfast tomorrow?”  Ty would ask his question as innocently as he could.
            Some groggy students simply said, “Goodnight, Ty,” and gently closed the door.  Others slammed it shut without a word. 
            Sometimes Ty played rough.  He’d fill a large trash container with water and lean it against the door so that when the person opened it, the water and refuse spilled into the person’s room. 
            Ty combatted the angry stare or cursing of the guy with wet feet and soaked carpet with a lilting tone and minimalist message.  “I meant no harm.”
            Kyle, Jackson, and I always laughed at Ty’s late night shenanigans, but Ty preferred his pratfalls because of the spontaneous reactions they produced. 
            He loved tripping his way through a classroom, knocking into people and through desks, especially on the first day of a semester.  Once a month, he’d fumble around the cafeteria and knock his tray or that of another and its contents to the floor and pretend it was an accident. 
            Most of all he loved running into a door, window, or other object at high speed.  He’d sneakily brace himself with his arms just before he hit it flush, but those nearby wouldn’t see his defense.  They only observed the crash and his collapsing to the ground.  Then when they stood over him and asked if he were okay, Ty would jump to his feet, announce he was fine, and flee.
            I understood Ty acted as he did to get approval in the form of laughter, but he also did it for us, his best friends.  He knew after a while that a number of guys on our floor didn’t appreciate his late-night activities and occasionally reported his misbehavior, but Ty never refused to do our bidding. 
            If any of us had a beef with someone, we could always convince him to place a leaner against someone’s door, knock loudly, and flee with the rest of us.  If any of us were ever down due to a bad grade, news from home, or whatever, there was Ty crashing into things, playing the fool for our benefit.  And if ever we thought we’d seen it all, Ty would up his game by sliding on the ice around campus before crashing into a faculty member or a car filled with university security officers. 
            Ty never cared about the personal consequences to him.  He always cared about the message above everything else.  That never changed.
           
 
            We attended a small, private university in the northeast.  The sort of place that used to appear idyllic whenever captured on a glossy brochure.
            I think the attraction was subconscious as much as anything.  Adams University offered an escape from the rest of the world.
            Located in a quiet, college town, Adams appeared removed from the problems of city life and the modern world as it were.  For our parents, this may have created images of a safe place for study.  High schoolers may have envisioned a teenage playground.  A Shangri-la where college rules trumped those of the rest of society. 
            Or maybe I was alone in my delusions.  I imagined a place where people lived and let live and experimentation was part of the expectation.  An arena where you could do as you wanted as long as you didn’t really hurt anyone. 
            I now understand places like that don’t really exist.  Maybe it’s why I ultimately became a lawyer.  So as to have a better understanding of the rules I’d previously wanted to wish away.
            As a freshman at Adams, I had no thoughts of law school.  I wanted to indulge without consequences, without regulations, and befriended those with a similar attitude. 
            I remember the evenign that we played $10/game, $5/euchre in the hallway until a resident assistant named Sara told us to break it up.
            “Why?” Jackson threw his cards onto the table as if a blackjack dealer had accused him of counting cards.
            “For one, your neighbors are complaining of the noise.”
            “I got to sleep.  Finals start Monday.”  Ty did a pretty good impression of our neighbors whining.
            “And, second, you can’t drink out here.”  The mousy sophomore pointed to Kyle, who rocked in his chair.  “And he’s really gone.”
            “He’s doing fine.”  Jackson reached out and tapped his playing partner’s shoulder.  “We’re only out here because we couldn’t play anywhere else.” 
            “You’re not allowed to drink in your rooms either.”
            “Ah, but you wouldn’t know if we were doing it there, would you?” 
            Sara smirked.  I still had a way to go to perfect the art of persuasion.  “Why aren’t you playing in your room anyway?”
            “Flipper’s with someone next door.”  I could tell Sara wasn’t tracking.  “You can go inside and listen if you want.  Thin walls.”
            “Just stop doing it in the hallway so I don’t have to write you up.”
            We all sat there for a moment after Sara left until Jackson picked up the card table mid-hand.
            “Hey, watch the beer.”  Kyle missed grabbing his or anyone else’s before my roommate carried the table and everything on top of it down the hall.
            “What you up to?”  I was the only one still sitting.
            “Same as always.  It’s up to the black guy to find the solution.”
            We found Jackson at the elevator bank.  I presumed he had a room on another floor in mind, but he placed the table down inside the otherwise empty elevator and held it open.  “Get the chairs.”
            “Why?”  Kyle took the opportunity to grab his mostly empty can from the table.
            “In case you want to sit, Dumbshit.  I don’t care, I’ll play standing.”
            The elevator began buzzing.  Apparently, someone on another floor wanted it.
            Jackson waved goodbye to us as the doors slowly closed.  “Press the button when you’re ready.  I’ll be here.”
            He was.  We found him, the cards, and our drinks, along with two freshman girls, when it re-opened.
            “You ladies up for a Vegas night?”  I gently guided Kyle and Ty towards Jackson’s side of the elevator so I could stand closer to the co-eds while we all traveled to the lobby.  “We’ve got a moving card game tonight.”  
            Those girls giggled but shook their heads and soon left us.  I continued to toss out lines to all the ladies who entered and even offered to escort a few of them to wherever they were headed.  Nobody except Jackson cared, and he didn’t really as long as I found someone to take my seat at the table so the game could continue.  That wasn’t a problem because throughout the night we encountered more than a few willing to play a game or two.
            Kyle ran back to our rooms whenever we needed more alcohol either for ourselves or our guests, though more than a few of our visitors willingly shared whatever they had as well.  He always returned with more than we needed and an update of the scores of the games on which Jackson had placed bets. 
            Ty performed pratfalls by sliding under the table or throwing himself against the walls whenever we came to a stop.  He picked himself up off the floor when two young women with heavy makeup who clearly thought they were out of our league entered on the first floor without smiling. 
            The prettier one raised her eyebrow and pulled out a cigarette.  “Do you mind?”
            “It’s not allowed.”  Jackson didn’t take his eyes off the board while he shuffled.
            “You guys going to complain?”
            “Aw, don’t tell me you guys never smoke.”  The friend offered us a pucker as she hit the button for the top floor.
            “Just after sex.”  I said this even though it wasn’t true because I thought it might provide a subliminal hint. 
            “How about you, Quiet Boy?”  The smoker bent close to Ty’s ear and spoke in a sultry voice that belied her age.
            Ty looked down upon himself, then shrugged his shoulders before delivering his variation of the old joke.  “I never thought of checking.”
            “You should.”  The pretty one glided into Ty’s personal space and planted a kiss on his lips before escaping along with the smoke through the first crack in the door when it reached her floor.  Her friend lingered and shook her head at us.
            “It’s just a kiss, boys.  Don’t go about getting hard.  It’s such a small space.”
            As soon as the door closed, Ty tumbled into the back of the elevator, crashed against it, and fell to the floor.  We all laughed, but when he staggered to get back to his feet, he hit the emergency call button and brought the party to a halt.
            “Hey, Sara.”  The most sober, Jackson spoke when the R.A. returned to investigate.
            Sara held the door open with her arm and scanned the room.  Ty held his arms apart as if we were still moving and he was trying to keep his balance.  Kyle still slid sips of beer past his lips even though he had his face planted on the table. 
            “I’m not sure I could count all the violations going on here right now.”
            “Good thing Kyle is tutoring you in calc,” Jackson said.
            Sara looked at Kyle, who lifted his hand as if he would shake Sara’s, but in doing so, knocked his beer to the floor.  Fortunately, it was almost empty so little spilled out.  
            “Good thing he’s not doing so tonight.”
            The elevator began to buzz having been called on another floor.
            “Maybe you could let this go.”  I offered Sara my pickup smile.
            “Looks like I have to right now, but I swear I’m going to get a pen and the write-up forms and you guys better not be here when I get back with them.”  She paused and looked at me.  “Or anywhere else I can see you.”
            Jackson dealt the cards quickly as soon as the door closed.  “All right, we can get in one last quick game before she gets back.  Don’t anyone be afraid to go alone.” 
 
 
            It might be tempting to blame our excesses on college life and say once we left our behavior changed.  If anything, we were all probably worse those first few years after graduation.  We all had a little bit of money then, so Kyle could afford to buy more drinks, Jackson could make bigger bets, and I could use my coin to try to impress the ladies.
            Ty gave acting a go and left us in favor of California.  I’m surprised he didn’t have more success, or any success as far as I know, but I don’t think his John Ritter-type schtick was in vogue at that time.
            He returned after a year and a half but didn’t want to tell us much about his experiences.  He appeared to have developed a sense of justice.  One afternoon as we rode the subway, we stood near the exit beside this guy in a thousand dollar suit using his cell phone to communicate with his partner.  “I was just there.  I’m walking home now.  Where are you?”
            Ty and I shared a glance.
            “Yeah, traffic’s loud.  I’m just passing the Met.”
            Ty grabbed the dude’s phone.  “Don’t believe him.  We’re in the subway.  Listen!”
            He held the phone to the subway door as our car rattled across the tracks and pulled into the next station.  He tossed the device back to the guy who appeared too surprised to react and walked out of the car as soon as the door opened, even though we were still two stops from our destination.
            I figured Ty was trying to find his way in the world like the rest of us.  Trying to navigate through life from the point in time when others might be tempted to forgive our idiocy as the acts of young men to that undefined moment when we really needed to make better choices because we’d be viewed as not quite so young and not as worthy of leniency.
            I helped Ty get an office job at a law firm where I’d just completed a stint as a summer associate but learned he was fired after only a couple of months on the job.  Apparently, he’d sexually harassed a few women.  I worried it reflected poorly on my judgment, but Ty’d never behaved like that in the past. 
            I called the gang together because I thought we all needed to talk to and about Ty.  Kyle requested we meet in a bar.  Jackson showed up with a pair of dice and had everyone place bets during the makeshift craps game/social gathering/intervention.  He arrived first and grabbed the seat with the best view of the television so he could monitor the scores.
            Jackson moved Kyle’s beer aside to clear space for me to roll the bones against the wall of our booth.  They rattled about against plates and glasses but stayed on the table.
            “Eight.   Any more bets?” Jackson handed the dice back to me.
            I shook them.  “So what happened?”
            “Roll.”
            “I need another drink.”
            “You asking me?”  Ty craned his neck about as if he were looking for a way to escape, but I had him boxed into the booth.
            I rolled.  “Who else?”
            “Seven.  Busted.”
            “Same?”  Our waitress stood nearby.
            I looked her up and down and agreed.  She was about a seven.  I’d take a shot later but returned my immediate attention to Ty.  “Of course, you.  Anyone else here have a problem?”
            Ty opened his eyes wide and threw his head back with an exaggerated motion.  “You’re kidding, right?” 
            “Everybody else here’s got a job or is in school.”
            “What you doing these days, J?”
            Jackson handed Ty the dice.  “Ticket broker.”
            “Legal or illegal?”
            “Some of both.  You’re up.”
            Ty fired the dice against the wall so hard the pair went flying out of the booth. 
            “Not cool, Funny Guy.”  Jackson pushed his way past Kyle to retrieve the dice.
            “You can’t harass women.  Especially after I stuck my reputation on the line to get you the job.”
            “I didn’t do anything other than the same shit I always do.  They couldn’t take a joke.”
            “You can’t do that stuff in the workplace.”
            “Why not?  Don’t I have a First Amendment right to say whatever I please?”
            “Not at a private business.”
            “What?”
            Kyle belched.  “He’s right.  First Amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech, not a private party’s.”
            I was the one in law school, but we all knew Kyle was the smartest member of the group.  He’d enrolled in a Ph.D. program in physics in the city right after undergrad.
            Jackson returned with the dice, placed them in Ty’s hand and squeezed.  “Keep ‘em on the table this time, shithead.”
            Ty shook them for a minute without rolling.  “Really?”
            Kyle and I nodded.  Ty rolled.
            “Seven.  A winner.”
 
 
            We all changed, eventually.  Some would say we matured.  I couldn’t say whether those of us who found partners in the years that followed evolved beforehand or first found the person who helped us later develop.
            Jackson started us off.  He met Ellie at the place where he was engaged in legal ticket brokering.  After he’d gained 50 pounds, lost most of the hair on his head, and added a proportionate amount to his face.
            He and Ellie first decided to put their own money at risk and established a competing business.  When that proved successful, they expanded operations.  They decided to gamble their entire lives together but restricted their social wagers to amounts they could afford to lose.
            Kyle met a colleague after he completed his Ph. D. and accepted a job out of state.  I can’t say what happened exactly because I didn’t see him for a long time and when I did, he looked and acted differently.  He just showed up at some point with Ofelia, a fellow faculty member in the physics department who focused on cryogenics.
            Kyle had always been nerdy in appearance.  He wore glasses and cheap, ill-fitting clothes.  But, away from our influence, he’d shed them for contacts and more fashionable threads.  He returned calmer, more poised, and much more frequently sober.
            I guess I shouldn’t expect to understand what changed my friends when I can’t even explain how it happened with me.  It’s not like I reached a certain age and thought I should alter my behavior.  Or did so consciously after seeing Kyle and Jackson happy.  I’d been happy with my life and my relationships with women.  I think.
            Then I met Angie.  I tried to play her but she just humored me. 
            We first met at a party shortly after I’d joined my firm as an associate.  She wasn’t a law student or a lawyer.  She was and is an artist, and her work was on display at the gallery where the party was held.  In fact, she stood near some of her work when we first spoke, but I didn’t put two and two together.  Especially because she was dressed more like an attorney than an artist in her little black dress.
            “So whose work do you like best?” I asked.
            “I think that’s the question I should be asking you.”
            I looked about.  I hadn’t thought there’d be a quiz.  I turned my back to Angie’s work and casually took in the room.  Too much color for my taste.  I pointed to a collection of metallic creations across the way.  They looked like 3-D paintings of buildings and bridges the way they leapt off the canvas.
            “Abbott, I like your eye.”
            When I looked back towards Angie, I saw a series of black and white photographs over her shoulders.  Portraits and landscapes that initially appeared dreary but which upon closer examination expressed humanity and earthiness.  I met Angie’s eye and was about to modify my earlier response when Ty slid into my leg from behind and took me out.
            “Safe!”  He jumped to his feet and spread his ams like a umpire making his call known to 50,000 spectators.
            I knew it had been a mistake to invite my friend, who ran from the gallery’s security as if he were a streaker on a ball field.  He zigzagged his way across the room, seeking attention more than an escape route. 
            Angie took one large step towards me.  “That your wingman?”
            “You know, from here, your work takes on a new perspective.”
            I meant her photographs but as she stood almost above me, her dress having inched its way up her long, sleek legs, I could almost see underneath.  Maybe I could have had I tried, but I rolled my head to the side to resist the temptation and avoid detection.  Angie placed her foot back in its original position.
            A week later, I was walking past a coffee shop on my way to work when I saw her sipping java in a booth.  She wore a plaid shirt and jeans.  She sat with someone, but I stopped and went inside and intruded upon their conversation. 
            “I just wanted to say I was referring to your art work when I was on the ground the other night.”
            “I know.  I’m glad it floored you.”
            “I’d say you did.”
            “You would if we both didn’t know better, right?”
            Our circles began intersecting so frequently I wondered if they’d previously done so and I’d simply failed to notice.  After our fourth encounter, I asked her out.  She immediately rejected me with a laugh, the pathetic shaking of her head, and an unwavering “no.”  I tried two more times with the same result with perhaps the slightest hesitation the last time.
            I thought I was out, having gone down swinging three times.  So I stopped playing and I guess I changed.  Angie probably realized this, as she’s more observant of my own behavior than I am, before I did. 
            Eventually, she took a chance when if I were her I wouldn’t have.  She asked me out by referencing the times I’d asked her out like the offer was still outstanding.  I didn’t say what I was thinking, which probably demonstrated that Angie was right.  I was different. 
 
 
            Ty changed without the influence of a woman.  He got an idea stuck in his head and wouldn’t let it go.      
            After being fired by the firm for sexual harassment, he obtained a position working on behalf of the State and immediately and purposefully began to harass female co-workers there.  He no longer did so to make anyone laugh.  He did it to make a point.       
            Ty claimed the First Amendment gave him an absolute right to express himself without “abridgment.”  He’d found the term in the Bill of Rights and began inserting it frequently in conversations.  That didn’t stop the State from terminating his employment.  
            “It’s not like I touched anyone.” 
            We sat at the same table at Jackson’s wedding reception.  This was before Angie and I had ever gone on a date, and I thought I never would, so I was scoping possible prospects.
            “I didn’t even proposition anyone, though I’d argue I couldn’t be punished for that either because those are just words too.”
            “Courts don’t share that view.”
            “Why not?”
            “You can’t be serious, can you?”  Ofelia sat with us.  She wore a checkered dress and spoke without the underlying levity I was accustomed to hearing among our core, and also with Ellie.  “Kyle said you’re always joking.”
            “I used to.  But now that I’m older I think I have an important point to make.  The First Amendment has to be absolute.  Look at the text.  It talks about Congress making no law abridging freedom of speech.  So I can say whatever I please, wherever I please, to whomever I please, and the government has no business telling me I can’t.”
            “Why don’t you verbally share state secrets with our foreign enemies and see where that gets you?”
            I got to my feet.  “Hey, who needs a drink?”
            Kyle and Ofelia signaled they’d had enough with their hands. 
            “Ty, let’s go see if we can find some ladies to dance with us.”
            Ty followed me and stopped making speeches that night, but I could tell Ofelia had not only failed to convince him of the error of his ways but had spawned in him new ideas.
 
 
            Ty missed Kyle’s wedding.  Not because he was he was angry with Ofelia but because by then his legal problems had grown.  He was arrested after standing halfway through a movie in a crowded theatre and shouting, “Run, everybody, that guy’s got a gun!”
            I told Ty in that instance his words were both false and unprotected and that he was putting people’s lives at risk with his behavior.  He disavowed any responsibility and claimed if anyone was trampled it was the fault of the trampler, or even the tramplee for not being better prepared for the occasional sudden trampling one had to expect from time to time in our society.
“Wouldn’t you have felt bad if someone had been injured as a result of your stunt?”
            “Not at all, but I’d offer them my thoughts and prayers nonetheless.”
            He made it to my wedding.  Barely.  He was arrested two days earlier.  He’d been selling sugar pills with various color coatings for months.  He claimed they’d been shown to improve one’s memory, increase muscle mass, fight cancer, give you a hard-on, or do whatever else potential buyers wanted.
            After bailing him out of jail, I threw Ty into a chair near my kitchen table.  I thought I had to make a show of it before Angie, given the timing.  After all, Ty was to serve as my the best man.
            “That’s bullshit pulling that crap right now.”
            “Cut it out.”  Angie placed her comforting hand on Ty’s shoulder, and I knew I didn’t have any reason to worry.  Angie liked Ty best among all my friends for some reason and had encouraged me to choose him for the special role.  Maybe she saw in him the struggling artist she might have been hadn’t her talent been recognized.  Or maybe she recognized the role he played in bringing us together.  “How was it this time?”
            “Same as always.  For some reason, guys in the clink just aren’t into pratfalls.”
            “One of these days you’re going to do something serious enough that someone’s going to look to put you away for a while.”  Lawyers always feel the need to warn everyone of the potential legal consequences of their actions.
            “One of these days somebody’s going to agree with me and acknowledge I have a right to say all the things I’m saying.”
            I left Angie and Ty in the kitchen to talk.  The problem with being a lawyer is after some time it’s hard to view the world, and especially our society, in any way other than through legal lenses.  Ty could argue every day for forever about his interpretation of the First Amendment and his right to freedom of expression, but it was more than well established that people couldn’t use words to harass others or defraud them or cause a panic in a crowded theatre.  No matter what the Bill of Rights said.  Common sense had trumped madness in both the legal and political arenas.
            Why couldn’t he understand this?
            “He does.”   Angie sat on the edge of our bed after Ty had left.  “He just believes the law should be different and is willing to stand up for what he believes.  It’s admirable.”
            I scooted closer to her.  “You don’t think he’s right, do you?”
            “Of course not.  It’s an absurd view.”
            “So what do we do with him?”
            “Help him.”
            “How?”
            “You guys were all extreme once too, right?  Drinking, gambling, chasing women.”
            Yeah, I knew we’d also been mad not so long ago.
            “Ty’s never found the person to help him focus.”
            “He’s never chased anyone or anything other than for laughs.  And now the point he’s trying to make.”
            “You sure?”
            “I can’t ever recall him really going after any woman.”
            “Guys?”
            I stared at Angie and thought about this for some time.  Maybe she knew my long-time friend better than I.
 
 
            Angie exorcised my madness.  For the longest time I’d believed the only perfect woman was the amalgamation of all of them. 
            Once I realized the error of my ways, I did everything I could to ensure Angie would have the wedding day she always wanted and deserved.  Basically by staying out of the way and agreeing to whatever she wanted.
            That turned out to be the right move.  The service, reception, and honeymoon exceeded our expectations, but a day after our return Ty made his most elaborate plea.  At 2:00 in the morning, he visited the home of an individual known to provide ardent, vocal support for certain constitutional rights. 
            From the public sidewalk outside the home, Ty used a bullhorn to express his absolute and uncompromising position in favor of First Amendment rights.  He was arrested twenty minutes later.
            Ty appeared defeated when I bailed him out of jail this time.  He no longer displayed the slightest desire to make anyone laugh or to make a point while I drove him home.
            “I thought at least he’d support me.”
            “While you shouted at him through a bullhorn at two a.m.?”
            “I thought the principle would be important to him.  But you know what?  I heard a gunshot.  Yeah, and then the cops came a few minutes later.  I was actually glad to see them for a change.”
            I took my eyes off the road and looked over a couple of times to be certain Ty wasn’t kidding.
            “So what was the problem this time?” he asked.
            “Reasonable time, place, and manner restriction.”
            “Nobody interprets the First Amendment as an absolute, do they?”
            “Just you, buddy.”
            “How much trouble am I in?”
            “I wouldn’t worry about this one.  He won’t press charges.  He’d show himself to be a hypocrite if he did.  Probably why the shot was fired first.  Scared you more that way.”
            “It did.”  Ty tugged on my sleeve.  “Sorry if I’ve acted crazy.  I’ll repay those I defrauded.  It wasn’t about the money.”
            “That’ll help.”
            “And I didn’t mean to bother those women.”
            “I know.” 
            I guided the car to the curb in front of the house where Ty rented a second story apartment.  He asked that I wait for him because he needed to run inside to retrieve something for me.  I watched as he raced up the stairs and missed the second to last one.  He slid, bounced, and tumbled his way to the ground.  It hurt just to watch my friend fall.
            I quickly unbuckled my seat belt and bolted from the car.  Only when I was halfway there and saw Ty sprawled on the ground did I remember.  How I hoped he’d spring to his feet and yell, “I’m okay,” once I stood above him.
            

​In the darkest hour of a summer’s afternoon, the clouds gathered in an elegant mass of deep grey. Mugginess hung thick in the atmosphere. Pushpa Pervez, sat curled up on a reclining chair, in the far end corner of her balcony. Inhaling a cocktail mix of air made of pungent rain and perfumed gardenias, she looked at a retinue of ants climbing up the balcony wall. She snapped at a minuscule black fly hovering over her upturned nose; she ruminated ‘well now, finally some rain, long overdue.’
            The horrid black flies swamped her. They stung her in a number of awkward places, under her upper arms, and her lower legs. She was beside herself with itchiness. No sooner had she started to scratch them, the itchy spots burst into ugly little blisters on a range of red mounds. They erupted randomly on the smooth surface of her elbow and the calf, like tiny molehills of all sizes and shapes. Visibly vexed, Pushpa looked at the red swellings and began to count them with her index finger. ‘Gosh 13!’ She swore under bated breath and rubbed lightly over in rapid successions to avoid an onslaught of abrasion of black blotches.
            Storm-clouds as menacing as they seemed, looked spectacular. They loomed at large in the distant horizon. She tried to decide whether or not, it would be prudent for her to go to the spice bazar after all. She was almost out of spice. For dinner tonight, fried, hot curried fish. Nothing less, could spice up this stormy evening.
            The spice bazar was just around the corner of the next street in the West End. She lived on a busy street. Most of the time, it was impossible to cross the Montague Road near her apartment building. Some days better than the others, but most of the time, people waited on the foot-path for hours before they could go to the other side. Pushpa, joined the cautious crowd and crossed over through the rush hour traffic.
            When she finally made it to the spice bazar, she walked the dirt-road to the nearest spice shop. The shopfront was decked with spices of many extraordinary colours. It showcased a great variety of saffron, turmeric, coriander, cumin and red chilly powder in top folded down, hessian sacks. Each packed with the potent goodness of Ayurvedic medicines. The yellow turmeric assisted in subsiding the swelling from the cancer of the bowel. Brown coriander and cumin served as antioxidants. The orange saffron, an aphrodisiac, and the red hot chilly, was the detoxifier. She took a deep breath of the varied flavours exuded from them. She asked the salesman sitting behind the products to pack a few grams of each. He scooped out a measured amount and poured it into neat brown paper bags. The rumblings of the clouds intensified. The storm would sweep through any minute now. Before the pelting began, she rushed to get back home, just when she saw a mother struggling to get through with a double perambulator. Pushpa wondered, what could have driven her to come out on a day like this? She stopped short to give her a hand with the perambulator. The mother looked at Pushpa and lashed out, “Don’t bother”.
            “Excuse me?” Pushpa asked taken aback.
            “I said, I don’t need your help. Mind your own business.”
            For the first time now, Pushpa actually stood back and looked at her. She could have been in her late forties, who had a distinctive beard and a moustache. Over-weight as she was, she was wearing a frumpy, old frock. She also saw several beer bottles necking out from the bottom pocket of the perambulator.
            “You clearly need help!” Pushpa tried.
            “And you’ve come to help?”
            “Yes, I think so.”
            “Thanks. But no thanks.” 
            Pushpa looked up and down and saw twin babies seated in the pram.
            “What do you mean?” she asked aghast.”Are you their mother or not?”
            “ And you, a complete stranger. Who’re you and why should I tell you?”
            The storm had started to roll in by now. Drizzles lashed haphazardly in the strong winds.
            “Look, I can help you, I think. It is raining. Shouldn’t we run for shelter?”
            “I don’t need shelter. I’m already sheltered. You go on now.”
            The woman paused and then pushed on straggling down the wet path. She disappeared among the motley crowd. It was so strange that Pushpa should’ve met this person. She had half a mind to follow her. But she didn’t. Then she also didn’t know what to do. The storm gained momentum in the meantime; and the visibility, quite poor, she decided to search for her. Soon the spices began run down in coloured rivulet through the soaked paper bag. ‘I don’t have to do this,’ she cried out in the heavy winds. ‘No you don’t,’ someone behind her screamed.’ She looked back and saw a young man talking to her.
            “Who’re you?” Pushpa yelled.
            “Time,” the young man replied.
            “Time?”
            “Yes. That is my name.”
            “What do you want?” Pushpa asked.
            They were running abreast in the same direction.
            I want to talk to you.”
            “I don’t understand,” Pushpa looked at him.
            “I would like to explain something to you.”
            “Like what?”
            “About the natural order.”
            “What about it?” she asked.
            “Did you not say just now, you wanted to help her?”
            “Yes I did?”
            “But you couldn’t.”
            “And how would you know? Have you been following me? Are you a stalker?”
            “You could say that, a stalker? I like that. Like I said, I’m Time.”
            “Should I have not offered to help, then?”
            “Yes. But that was all in the plan, as was her refusal. There was nothing you could do to change that.”
            “Plan? What plan?”
            “I saw everything coming. Down to the last minute.”
            “Why did you not stop to help her then?”
            “Because I can’t either!” said Time.
            “Her perambulator was stuck and I was just trying to get it out of the rut.”
            “That’s the whole point of it. The bit on the perambulator was but a fraction of an entire chain of events. Her disapproval meant, you couldn’t help, because it was no more pre-determined than the sun setting in the East and rising in the West. Get it?”,
            “How was I to know that?”
            “You don’t! No one does. Events that come to pass are pre-determined! Even seers get baffled sometimes. Do you not see where I’m going with all this?”
            Not completely sure, Pushpa kept running. In the blinding rain, she couldn’t see the woman anywhere, neither could she see the young man, anymore. She stopped, clearly chagrined. She looked around. ‘Where did he go now?’ There was a shady tree nearby. She thought, she would sit down here to catch a breath. Its umbrella leaves drooped in the rain water. A couple of hours later, the man suddenly appeared, and sat down beside her under the tree. “Come with me” he told her. Close your eyes for a moment, and put your trust in me. Come, let’s time travel together.”
            “What? Time travel?
            “Yes time travel.”
            “You’ve been gone these past couple of hours.”
            “Yes, I know. I’ve been away a rude few moments,” he said.
            “I am older by those few moments, now,” she laughed.
            “You’re, my dear. You’re a time-rider, unlike me. I am wrapped all around you. While you age on account of me, I don’t,” Time said. “Come let’s go for a ride.”
            “Where to?”
            “Imagine, you’re on a date with me. This young man who took you somewhere you could only dream of,” replied Time.
            “Okay. I could live with that,” she said.
            He held her hands and they took off. Jetting through the air at the speed of light, Time transformed into a white knight on a winged mythical horse, called the Buraq. They rode on this unicorn through various time warps. He took her to a place where larks and the doves chirped in the depths of ancient olive groves; olive groves, doves, she asked in awe, “Are we in some kind of an oriental paradise?”
            “Maybe we are. The heavenly God’s waiting for you, humans, to seek Him out and to meet Him here.”
            “Really? Have you seen him?”
            “No.”
            “Well, where is he?”
            “Everywhere and nowhere. Down under, up above. Don’t really know.”
            “Why should we worship him then?”
            “Don’t, if you don’t want to. He wouldn’t care.”
            “But we’re stuck in His plans nevertheless, aren’t we? The cosmic scheme that he has devised for us?”she asked.
            “Yes. Do you know how His “cosmic scheme” works?” he asked.
            “No.”
            “Events not only pass, they’re intrinsically irreversible too,” said Time.
            “Irreversible? In what sense?”
            “That’s where it gets tricky. It means events are tied up in irreversible knots. What’s meant to happen? Will happen, thus fatalistic, and also irreversible. For instance, no one could reverse that meeting with the woman in the market; it had to happen at that precise moment in time.”
            Saying so, Time gave her a kiss on her lips and vanished with her into another warp. This place felt like a new day, bursting into a sunny, late afternoon after a fresh rain. She, sat by the jaded River Nile, and he, the young man sat with her. They saw together Cleopatra’s golden chariots pass with Mark Antony by her side. Conversations with this elusive character, opened her eye to this theory of irreversibility. “You were saying?” Then, she saw the reversal of every moment from this point backwards. She saw through a portal, her own events unfurl. This rare date with Time; meeting him in the rain; searching for the lady in distress; stopping by to offer her help; getting insulted in the process; crossing the Montague Road; feeling itchy; getting bitten by black flies; watching the ants and the storm from the balcony; sitting curled up in her chair. She kept taking the clock backwards, as far back as she could. She was a baby again. Then the growing up began. With every step forward, time traveled backwards. Each precious moment disappeared into the past. Here and now, her mind danced like waves; her thoughts roamed freely. The clock ticked tirelessly onwards. With each ticking, world’s events reversed. Epic wars, ancient history, the Pharaohs, once in the future, now gone. And then she beheld trees, the humming birds, the dragon-flies and the petrified forests; the milky-ways, constellation, the galaxies, the entire cosmos. All rushed back together through celestial spacetime like rewound cinema. She saw the beginnings and the endings alike. There was darkness before the inception of time. Time set the universe in motion. With a bang some billions of years ago, she saw it all. How the universe expanded like a stretched balloon, life was born on earth. Yet, it was in this very passage that time also took steps backward. Every passing minute, life glided towards death. Deaths took place. Time traveled through the future, the present, back into the past. In this travel, it carried all events of the human dramas downstream. The future became the present, and the present became the past, lost backwards in the snitches of time. Then the universe crunched back to singularity. It collapsed into the blissful 7th sky of a complete void. She saw how time itself came to a halt. How the clocks stopped ticking and even the death of time had occurred. Time itself had died.
            These were pre-determined events, of  irreversible order. That was the deep paradox, lay within this metaphysics; the irreversibility of reversed order. Her friend, Time, who kissed her in the olive grove. One who truely wrapped her around like the tortuous roots up the brawny bark of the oak tree. She noted his word,’wrapped’ her, within his invisible heart. He showed her some more. That no human predictions, nor interventions could change this rigid paradigm, nor its luminous pathway of marked irreversibility. People had no hand in reversing this course, but only a belief that they thought they did.
            ‘What the heck? Feeling itchy again,’ she complained. Time zapped her back in a flash, and sat her down with a jolt on the root of the old oak tree. Then he was gone.‘Where is Time?’ She asked. ‘He is gone, yet again.’ She imagined the tight kiss, as she looked around for him in her familiar surroundings. ‘Well, of course, he would be, wouldn’t he?’ She locked her arms together and felt a chill go right through the spine. The storm-clouds was still dark. She came home. Upon returning, she found a towel lying on the apartment floor. The gusty winds blew clothes off the pegged line.
            She put the kettle to the boil. While the water boiled, she picked up a cup and a saucer to make a cup o’ tea. She put two sugars, and a dash of milk over a tea bag into the cup and poured hot water straight in. Then, she carried the hot cup out on the balcony. The storm was nasty. Branches of the trees came undone; they flew in havoc. She picked up her six months old knitting, lying on  the coffee table. Looking out, she began to knit. She couldn’t procrastinate much longer. Just a few days now, that the full season change would embark; autumn’s ‘mellow fruitfulness and mists,’ heralded the sweet summer’s peaceful retreat. Caught up in this Tango dance with Time, that memorable date, at the speed of light, was an unmissable eye-opener. ‘How about that? Going back to source? That’s mad,’ She speculated.
 

​Robt. Emmett [not his real name of course] has, after retiring from a large international, manufacturing company as a machine design engineer, [he had no engineering degree]. His imagination and the continuing need to create urged him to write over half a million or so words about his early life in the mid-1950s.
He’s published nothing because his short stories are about his high school years [when the world was young, the music was great, the cars were unique, and the young ladies were just that - ladies], and who wants to read stories of what was?

​I’ll introduce myself, (cuz no one else will). I’m the person everyone almost remembers. I lack drama and charisma. I am, seemingly not very memorable, hence the nom de plume, Vanilla Bob. I write somewhat caustic caricatures of the people, places, things, and the world in general
I am the faceless face in the crowd. You see me everywhere and remember me not at all. I am the guy in the hotel lobby, sitting on the has-been sofa, reading yesterday’s newspaper. You see me looking at the ugly, newly planted, statuary in the city park, obviously donated. Only a moron would pay semi-good money for such a monstrosity. You see me twisting and turning the map, trying to figure out where I am or where I want to go. I am the one looking the wrong way while riding the sightseeing bus. I am cheated out of my seat on an airline flight by a can’t speak a word of English Taiwanese fellow in a cheap suit (I know it’s a xenophobic remark, live with it.) Yet, after landing, his English is better than mine is.

​(Editor: That’s not hard to do!)
 
(Author: Did I mention my editor she hates me?)

​My luggage gets lost when I traveled to the left coast - by train!
My writing career started in the fourth or fifth grade. The nun thought I had a gift. Every two weeks she made me read a book and write a report to broaden my outlook.
In high school, I discovered girls. Scratch the writing. I decided I would rather be a doctor - a gynecologist. To further my pre-doctoral studies, I purchased a ’49 Nash Rambler with a rear seat that converted into 47 square foot mohair examination room. The car thing did not work out as well as I had hoped. Most fathers, upon seeing my mode of transpiration, sent their daughters back into the house. I traded it for a ’51 Metropolitan. The back seat would barely hold two Chihuahuas let alone two teenagers in a compromising position. The wool blanket cost me two bucks at the Army/Navy surplus store. It proved to be a very entertaining investment!
My first college medical course, a study of diseases of the Belgian Congo was my undoing. 

​To continue, I had symptoms of every tropical disease I read about, even Cannabuous fever. There had been only three cases reported. Because of all my illnesses, I missed most of my classes that quarter. The Dean of Admissions did not believe sleeping on a couch in the Student Union was proper recuperating. He released me for Academic underachievement, no M.D.
Now I am hack writer for a rag that makes the Sun-Globe and the National Equistar seems as prophetic as the Bible. They do get a chuckle from some of the things I submit. They don’t pay me much for those items. They are cheap, but they do provide me a per diem. It covers my costs. Life has taught me to live simply. I am not good enough to be on the regular payroll. If (a very large word) I am paid for one of my scribbling’s, I squander it on a glass of local beer. Scotch, the beverage of the gods, hasn’t crossed my lips in a very long while. It might again – someday.
SAM, my editor, sent me here to write about this place that the locals call the Zenith City.
 

​Check-in at the Edge

​It was kind of late when I checked into my new digs; it was after sundown. I was not sure how long I was staying. The sleepy-eyed collegiate behind the check-in counter greeted me with a yawn and a pasted on smile. I filled out the registration card. She looked at it, then at me and inquired why I had left the ‘length of stay’ line blank. I told her my stay would be – indefinite. Obviously, it was a new word for her. Her eyeball tumbled like a cheap one-armed bandit and stopped at triple ’Tilt’. I tried to explain. Her look told me nobody was home between her ears, so I said two weeks. That worked. She smiled, ran my credit card through the black box, and pressed a few buttons. It blinked and so did she. Her world was happy. Good. She tore a map off the map pad, circled room 2204, and handed it to me, along with the plastic room key. The room was on the fourth floor. Room 2204 on the 4th floor, that’s a new one. Most room numbers start with the floor number. But then again I’m now in youper * country. So deep into youper land, in fact, that most sentences end with an “Eh” generated in the back of the throat.
 
I was hoping to get some help carrying my things to the room. I looked around and noticed the ancient bellboy. How can an octogenarian be called ‘boy?’ He was sprawled across two rattan chairs, which obviously came from the Red Shield store. He was snoring up a storm until Sleepy-eyes dinged the dinger. He ran a bony hand over his stubbled face as he unlimbered himself from the rattan. I was not sure whether the creaking sound was sigh of relief from the chairs or from his old bones. Slowly he straightened to a height of nearly six-feet. His uniform looked vaguely familiar. Old memories flashed through my mind like the flickering rotation of the wheels of a one-armed bandit. Wheel one – Clunk. It was the image of the marquee of the Norshore movie theater on Superior Street. The second wheel stopped. It was the high school photo of my date for the evening. She was wonderful, and unforgettable in every way. I sighed. Ah, those were the days. How could I forget the unforgettable Miss What’s-her-name? The third and last wheel slowly spun down and stopped. A kid, in an usher’s uniform. The very same uniform sitting it rattan chair yawning at me. It was also the same face, but with higher mileage. Back in the day, we all called him, Sluggo. I don’t remember why, we just did. 
 
He slowly sauntered toward me. Foolish person that I am, I assumed he would take my suitcase and clothing bag, or at the very least one or the other. No, he picked up my small shaving bag and headed to the door. I grabbed my stuff and hurried after him. Outside I asked him why we did not take the elevator. He stopped, squinted at me, and sighed in a tone suggesting I was an idiot. He explained we could not get from the lobby to my room using the elevator from the lobby. We walked out the door, up a set stairs of questionable quality. Then along a walkway that swayed eerily like the one I’d trod across in the Amazon rain forest.
 
At the room, I stuck the plastic room key in the slot – red light. I tried it again, same results. Try three also failed. What was it Einstein said about doing the same thing again and expecting different results? Sluggo took the key, struck it in the slot, and jiggled it up twice and down once. Wallaha – green light, oh yes, insanity. The king sized bed was not lumpy, but the pillows were. A wonderful start to my wonderful stay in the wonderful Zenith City, one can only hope.
 
*Inhabitants of the upper portion of the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are sometimes called youpers.
 

​Arachnidville

​My aching bladder woke me. I tinkled (more on that later) and dressed for the day, black jeans and white T-shirt that I had received when I toured a pizza factory. Pizza factory! What has this world come too! Pizza dough needs overhead twirling, the tomato sauce needs to be ladled and spread with care, and each piece of pepperoni must be placed with casual precision.
 I opened my door, stepped out - almost. I was immediately stuck in the spider web covering the entire opening. I could barely move. I looked around and noticed half a dozen, silver dollar sized, saber-toothed Arachnids closing in on me. I managed to save myself with my 2-inch switchblade knife. (It used to be 6-inches long before I used it as a pry bar) I hacked myself free just as the first of my lunch guests were about to lay a paw on me. Damn, the office needs to know about these people eaters!
As I stepped into the office, mister Oily glided to the counter next to a very short bottle blond, and asked, “Yeeees? May I help you?” He had a stereotypical, wannabe seven-day-old beard. What did he want to be? I wondered. Then I happened to look at his feet. Do not ask me why, I do not know. I just did. He was wearing cowboy boots with four-inch heels. Question answered, he wanted to be taller than the five-foot-two blond semi-cutey.
I asked him if he knew there was a spider problem
“Room 2204?” He inquired. I nodded. “Well, that explains disappearance of the previous guest and all his stuff’s still in the room.”
“Are you going to spray or something?”
He inhaled, straightened to his max height of five foot three, looked up his nose at me, “This establishment has a strict environmental policy and has no intention of harming the wonderful earth or the creatures on it. We let nature do its thing.”
“Really!”
“Yeeees! The Spiders eat the mosquitoes, the dragonflies eat the spiders, and the bats eat the dragonflies. Therefore, you see, all nature is in harmony. You wouldn’t want the balance of nature upset, would you?”
And what the hell is a missing motel guest or two, I thought. “Of course not. So, what do you suggest I do?”
Reaching under the counter, “Here,” He handed me a large, holey bath towel, like the two in my room, “Swirl this around the door frame as you exit your room.”
I thanked him and turned to leave. Then it hit me, a light bulb moment, I asked Oily, “Where is the nearest gun store and a place to get some breakfast?”
“Did not the night girl tell you that we have a free breakfast in the fourth floor cafeteria, between 6:00 and 10:00 a.m.?”
“Ah, no.”
“Did she give you tokens for free drinks in the Sunrise Lounge?” I nodded. He handed me two aluminum tokens, “They are good between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m. After that you have to buy your drinks.”
“Thanks,”
“Might I inquire as to the reason that you are visiting our fair city?” Oily asked.
“I was sent here to do some local color stories.”
“Here, in this town? Ha! Good luck with that.”
 

​Cafeteria Ptomaine

​The elevator door closed and just for grins and giggles, I press button number 2. Sluggo said the elevator did not go to the floor where my room, 2204, was located. He was correct. The four by four foot cube I was in did not move. I pressed 4. The elevator’s chime, chimed, the number 4 lit and the groan and the vibrations started. When they finally stopped, the door struggled to open. I surveyed the cafeteria. I picked up a tray and some plastic ware. It had a long counter, a milk dispenser, a juice machine, followed by the dry cereal in a clear plastic contraption. It contained twenty-four different types of sugary, non-nutritious types of crap passing as breakfast food. Next was the section with all the good stuff. I was impressed with the hard-boiled egg (singular), fresh-diced fruit of questionable origin and oatmeal (remember the white school paste the girl next to you in the first grade would eat by the finger-full?). Next to the oatmeal was brown sugar and raisins. (Some of the raisins were moving.)
A voice like fingernails on a blackboard startled me. “Do you know that there are tons of things happening in town? Well there are. Really, there are. Did the road construction cause you any problems? No, I don’t suppose it did. It does some people. It does some people. Are you enjoying your stay? My name’s Kathie. Now I need to empty the trash. If you need anything, let me know, okay. Bye.”
Her voice was still ringing in my ear as I slid my tray along the tray rail. It suddenly stopped at the milk dispenser. I my car’s brakes should have that kind of stopping power. I looked at the rails - sticky, splattered milk all over them. I decided I would pass on the milk and have juice instead. I set a plastic cup on the machine, pressed the cranberry button. Water filled my cup. I set a new cup under the orange juice, pressed the button, and a nice stream of juice flowed over my hand. I moved the cup to catch it. Sucking the orange juice from my thumb, I noticed the toast machine in the far corner. I placed a piece of unnutritious white bread on the toaster’s conveyor. After the third time through, it felt slightly above room temperature and was sorta tan.
I turned and bumped into chatty Kathy. My orange juice dumped onto my semi-toasted toast.
“Did you know there are three class reunions scheduled this weekend?” She asked.
“Ah, no I didn’t.” I should give a crap.
“Oh yes. East, West ...”
“And all around the town,” I finished.
“And more,” she continued, “Marshall and that girls school, Stanbrook.”
Girl’s school? This might be interesting I should go. “What year?”
“It’s an all-years reunion, with emphasis on the class of 1961.”
Oh goodie, a convention of ex-pom-pom gals in walkers. I dumped the remains of my soggy toast and juice into the trash. Coffee, I need coffee. At the stainless steel urns, I found one of three still had some amber brew remaining. I filled three Styrofoam cups and emptied the pot. I capped and set the cups on my tray, tucked a copy of the local newspaper under my arm, and turned. Something crashed into my left knee, a three-year-old whirling dervish in short-pants. Rebounding off my leg as my paper landed on his head. I thanked God it was not my scalding coffee. He started to wail. I glared at the mother. I should have told her some people shouldn’t be allowed to breed until they had taken a class on parenting – twice!
I just needed to get to the quiet of my room and enjoy my breakfast. The coffee, it was delicious.
 

All around the town ~ Part One
​​

​I finished my coffee and headed out to see the sights. The town’s changed in the last four decades. It is not as I remembered it from my year here in high school. I stepped off the 1919 vintage trolley. I marveled at the peeling paint job.  I was at the midpoint of town. I love the way cities designate the heart of things. Main Street and Center Avenue, gosh, how unimaginative is that. The starting point for the city of Duluth’s is imaginative, Lake Avenue and Superior Street.  

​(Editor: In your opinion, why is that so imaginative?)
 
(Author: The west end of Lake Superior is a block or so away.)
 
(Editor: So?)

​The entertainment area now contained a comedy club/bar, a movie house/bar, a live play theater with a bar, and a book store/bar. Why the emphasis on drinking, I wondered? Later, I found out that there was a 5% drink tax, a 5% alcohol tax, a service tax, and a sales tax on the total bill. That figures, this burg only has three months to make its annual profit. Taxation is the easiest method to screwing the tourist out of his money.
Speaking of screwing, the old whorehouse had burned down. However, the old strip joint, Club Saratoga, has upscaled. It’s now a Gentleman’s Club. Meaning, one can wear a suit while leering at females clad only in pasties. A pastie is not to be confused with a pasty, which is a folded pastry case filled with savory seasoned meat and vegetables.
This week’s featured performer at the Club is, Drum roll please – Lightening. I read the billing on the wall as I tried to peek in the double glass doors. “See her counter-rotate her 38s,” the ad said. Oh yes, a real World War II vintage holdover, a defiant must see, but not now.
I walked around the corner and entered the old warehouse district. Now, obviously it is a wearhouse area contained a dozen or so Boutiques. That is a fancy French term for, all manner of cheaply produced, overpriced clothing, made in Pakistan or Malaysia, by child labor. I would walk naked before I would buy any of the crap produced there and sold here, and chance being arrested by the E.P.A. police.
The junk yards of old were gone. New ones had sprung up in their place. They sold genuine, handmade, keepsakes. Indian beaded headbands, toy Birch bark canoes, totem poles, and other junk, labeled “Souvenirs.” All produced and shipped to the United States from China.
My empty stomach suggested that I feed it. I dropped into an uncomfortable wire chair at the nearest sidewalk eatery. The waitress was busy talking to the customer at a nearby table. As I waited, I could not help noticing her cute ass and the tramp stamp above it. Why, I wondered, would any sane person have the price of a shrimp dinner tattooed in a place they could not see and in a language, they could not read? She turned and looked at me. I noticed that she had 27 pieces of decoration stabbed into one ear. The premiere item was in the earlobe. It was a 3-carat piece of glass. The other ear held nothing. Obviously, that ear did not need beautification. Her hand, arm, and shoulder held dozens of unrelated tattooed symbols, in various shades of ugly blue. The vision of her fondling my food leapt into my brain. My stomach did a double flip with a twist and a half to send a message to my legs, “Leave now! I am about to empty and embarrass you!”
 

All around the town ~ Part Fore
​​​

​My still starving gut insisted it needed feeding. It rested on my large western buckle I’d just bought. It was made in Mexico. (Hey, it’s at least in the Western hemisphere) I spotted a sign, Grandmas Restaurant. Sounds like a family type place. I seemed to remember the building from my youth. At that time, a little bald-headed man named Jim ran the restaurant. He had a cute, young, redheaded waitress that I dated. She moved on and became a success. I just moved on. They served great food and the place was the Sand Bar Cafe. Times change and now the place is a food joint / bar / gift shop / and more. In addition, it is a place to hang all the cast-off memorabilia from the renovated buildings in the center of the city. The first lighted, motorized barber pole in town now lights the way to the head, toilet for you non-nautical types. Being near a large body of water brings out the sailor in me. After all, the only Arial Lift Bridge in the world is only a hundred yards away, and the need to … well, that’s how I saw the barber pole. There were signs from the old hotels, gas stations, and other miscellaneous junk. The owner had found a way to give up the warehouse where he had stored all his stuff and turn it into an attraction. Okay, he can call it that, it is his place.
I sat in a booth with a view and looked at the drink menu. The only beer in bold print on the menu was an 11-ounce tap of St. Louie Brew. Oh yes, it is cheap stuff, fit only for airline stewards and sorority sophomores. For flavor, the brewing water is from the Chicago River. Someone once told me it was how Chi-town removes its sewage. So I have heard. While waiting, and enjoyed the view of the Bridge and the lighthouse at the end of the canal.
Dimple-cheeks, the waitress, arrived, took my order. The way she looked at me, I assumed I had ordered her favorite malted beverage. She started to walk away, turned, and said, “Ya know, fur da same price ya can get 22 ounce Samuel Adams. Da special today, don’t ya know, eh.”
“Change my order,” I requested.
“U betcha, eh. Comin’ right up, fur sure, eh.”
The college English major left me to scrutinize the food menu. I say food rather than salt laden artery clogging pap that lab rats would not eat, because I do not want to demean the joint. I looked out the window and enjoyed the view.
She returned with my beer. “Ja whanna order now, eh?”
“Okay, I’ll have the double deep fried whole onion and the Ship Captain’s burger.”
“Okey-Dokey, ya want cheese on da Ship Captain’s burger, eh?”
“No.”
“Yous a tourist, eh, I can tell from yous accent.”
“And you do not have an accent?”
“Oh no, I talk like everyone else ‘round here. Fur sure, eh. Da reason I’m asken, is det yous order es big ‘nough fur a discount coupon. I be bringin’ ya one, eh.”
“Sure.” The linguist left me to wait in anticipation of the gourmet feast. I return to looking out the window, and enjoying the view.
 
There are no parts 2 and 3. I just called this part fore to screw with the editor’s head, and because it comes be-fore the next part.

​(Editor: I will get even you know!)

​All around the town ~ Part Last

​Two gray-haired, senior women plunked into the booth behind me. They talked so loud I assumed the batteries in their hearing aids needed charging. It was distracting my thoughts of the view. The shoulder length, chestnut hair, was bobbing to something the woman sitting across from her had said. The back of the booth was blocking my scrutiny of the rest of her. True, I couldn’t see all of her, but I have an above average imagination. I had a good view of her girlfriend, a mutt. Why do beautiful chicks hang out with mutts? Not that the diminutive, plump, bronze-red, spiked haired, chatty, sweat thing was a non-looker, oh no, she was definitely a 10, on the Kelvin scale!
Dimple-cheeks shocked me, “Wanna nother beer?”
I looked at my stein. Surprise, it was empty. “Yes.”
“U betcha, comin’ right up, fur sure, eh.”
Ah, Jeezs, the View and the mutt were holding hands. I really hate that kind of public affection. It shattered my mental vision of the View. The mutt slid out of the booth, the View followed, and I got an eyeful. She had long, slender legs in tight jeans, trim waist, and a neatly trimmed Van Dyke! Damn. He sure had me fooled.
Now all I had for entertainment was the two gray-haired chatterboxes in the booth behind me. Another gray-haired couple, a man and, I assume, his wife, sat in the booth across the aisle from me. This must be a local meeting place for the gray panthers. The linguist zipped in and handed them menus. Fur sure, eh. As she left them, the old man ogled the swing on her back porch. I had my thoughts. What would an old stud like you do if she said, ‘Yes?’ The look on the wife’s face hinted at her thoughts. There’s not enough Viagra in the world to bring your old Lazarus to life!”
“Here ya go, eh. I had da cook put somma Swiss on dat, fur free, fur sure, eh.” she said as she set the double deep fried whole onion and the Ship Captain’s burger in front of me.
“Jeezs eh, dat wassa nice a yous, tanks a bunch fur sure, eh.” I don’t know why I talked to her that way. Oh yes I do, 22 ounces of Samuel Adams, fur sure, eh.
She looked around. None of her customers needed her. “Mind if I sit witch ya?”
“Suit yourself.” I had my mouth under control again.
She did, on the bench opposite me.
Between burger bits, beer swallows, salt crunching, and belching, we talked. I found out she was from the Iron Range. It sounds like a kitchen appliance. She assured me that it was an okey-dokey place to live. She wanted to be a teacher. She planned to return to her hometown of Coleraine and instruct the local kids about English. I asked her, what in retrospect was a very dumb question, why?
“Jeezs eh, everyone up dar speaks Finn. Da kids needa learn English, so da can go tada main campus an get an education, doncha know, eh.”
I was about to respond ...
“Whoopsies,” the multilingual waitress jumped up and headed to the kitchen, “gotta get da food fur dem silver-haired ladies, eh.”
I finished the burger, but not the double deep fried whole onion. It was a bit much and had killed all my salt tasting taste buds, U betcha, fur sure, eh.
 There is one more part. Therefore, this is not the last, but I am not going to change the title.

​All around the town ~ Epilogue *

​More gray-haired senior women and couples plunked into the booths around me. This must really be the local meeting place for the gray panthers. I raised my beer glass as Miss Dimple-cheeks, my server from the Iron Range, as she walked past. The linguist promptly returned, set down a fresh steinful of Samuel Adams my table, and zipped in to wait on a pair of gray-headed couples in a nearby booth. I finished this 22 ounces of Samuel Adams I would be well passed my limit of beer.
Have you ever eavesdropped on the conversations of old farts? You should. Be warned, you need to get to the food joints early. They get there at 2:45 and are mad as hell because they have to wait until 3:00 to order the early-bird special. You can tell where they are eating. Look for parking lots filled with newer big Buicks, Chryslers, or white Ford pickup trucks with a fifth wheel rigs in the box for pulling an eighty foot long, twenty wide, house trailer. Just knowing they are ziggin’ and zaggin’ down the road makes me glad to fly my favorite generic friendly skies airline’s DC what-ever wide-body. 
They only talk about two topics. No, they do not talk about their children or grand kids, yet. The number one subject matter before eating is the other places they have dined. They do the pros and cons of every meal and every eatery within a hundred miles. They know them all. Which ones have specials and on which day and at what time. They discuss the food quality, the wait staff, and the comfortableness of the seating arrangements. They never talk about the drinks, unless it is lemonade. Then they wax nostalgic about the nectar of the citrus world. They even talk about the water, the glass it comes in, and if the ice is clear or cloudy. They do this before their food arrives. These folks need to get a life.
The do talk about their children or grand kids. In their vernacular, it is dessert conversation. Meaning, they are talked-out and are about to bring out the photo albums, yes albums. Gray-hairs carry them in a separate, large purse.  
After their food arrives at their table, the conversation turns medical. They entertain the listener, and all those within in ear shout, (Yes, ear shout. Batteries not includes) of their latest medical procedure. Gray-hairs love to regale their fellow diners with the blood and the gore, in detailed minutia, stories of their latest operation. All this while the listeners are glopping excess ketchup all over their super tenderized ground beef. Dentures discussions are a sub-set of the medical conversation. Usually they are an interruption interjected into the conversation when someone bites into a tough piece of mashed potato or asparagus spear.
Women are far more detailed than men are. Their explanations of their lasted trip to the doctor are far more colorful. A woman at the next table interrupted the man, chocking on a baby carrot. She visited her gynecologist about a fungus that had developed in her ….
I left half a glass of my friend Sammy, ran to the nearest phone, and called the motel to request their limo (it had started life as a 9-door, ’49 Chevrolet, Airport Limousine) pick me up. It was on its way, the sweet voice said. As I waited, I browsed the over-priced China-made trash in the gift shop. I decided not to get the coffee cup with a simulated seagull splotch in the bottom. On the limo ride, I decided to take an afternoon nap. Wait, was the simulated seagull splotch simulated? Yes, I think. At the motel, I quickly fell asleep. No, I did not pass out.
 
* Epilogue, is a fancy word that, in old Greek (I think), means I have a bit more to say.

​Hockey 101

​After my nap …

​​(Editor: You were drunk and passed out, weren’t you?)
 
(Author: I did not pass out.)

​As I started to say … I was sitting behind the unwatered, scruffy, evergreen thing near the dark end to the balcony overlooking the swimming pool and entertainment area. I use the term loosely. It’s a mini-golf overgrown with weed and sticker bushes.
Anyway, she must have gone down the large blue, inflatable slide – headfirst. One would think a woman on the sunset side of fifty would know better. Her scream got my attention. I do not think she likes snacking on pea-gravel. She spit it all out. Then she turned and looked at the twelve-foot high slide. I thought for a moment that she was going to try again. She shook her short, soggy, bottle-made copper-red hair, and walked away. We both heaved a sigh, hers was resignation, and mine was relief. I found no joy watching someone embarrass herself, himself, and/or theirself.
 As she left, I noticed the three SUV’s desperately trying to squeezing into four parking places. The car’s plates were from out of state, way out of state, Utah, Arizona, and California. They unloaded half a dozen young teenage boys, who promptly went to check out the swimming pool and the teenage girls lounging there by. The moms headed to the rear of their vehicles to start unloading their luggage. The SUV’s were so over loaded than when the hatch audibly popped open, things spilled onto the grass studded gravel parking lot. The desperate moms called down to their boys to help haul the large bags stuffed with all manner of hockey equipment.
It seems the sight of the bikinied girls had caused the boys to lose their hearing. The moms, therefore or therefive, had to lug the bags up the flight of stairs to the second floor without the help of their sons.
And just how, you ask, did I know the large bags held hockey stuff? Simple, the bags said Hockey Stuff. No, actually, I’d over heard the two bellboy (yes, real boys) talking. They knew the hockey kids were coming and made plans to be anywhere but the lobby. When I discerned the large leather bags and the nine or ten hockey sticks, my mind leaped to the obvious conclusion. 
Before supper, as I’d been sitting behind the dead plant in the lobby and learned there was a large, 200 plus, contingent of young hockey players in town for a clinic. There would be two days of seminars, practices, and instruction. Teams would then be formed and spend the rest of the week competing against each other. Generally, it would be the left coasters against the youpers. Those were the kids from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and central Canada.
I overheard Pennie the Slider, talking with the hockey-mom in the room next to mine. She is from Utah (Mormon, I would guess). Slider’s last name was Nickels and she was talking to the collegiate behind the check-in counter. Moms really need to think through this whole kid-naming bit. Later in the evening the hockey moms, Mormon, Sue-1, and Sue-2 were outside my room. Sue-1, a.k.a. Loudmouth, was extolling the skills of her two great sons. She assured all within ear shoot, that the left-coasters and her sons in particular would be opening a can of whoop-ass on these mid-westerners and show them what hockey was all about. If the young youpers knew what was in store for them they would have been trembling, not in fear, but with laughter.

​Hockey 101 (cont.)

​​It is another sweltering day here in the Zenith City. Yesterday, the temperature reached 78. All major appliance stores sold both air conditioning units they stocked for just such an emergency as the city is experiencing. Today’s high temperature was predicted to be 79-1/2. There is not a weatherman …

​Editor: You forgot add ‘and weatherwoman.’)
 
(Author: Can the sexist crapola, will ya?)

​​… In town who will publicly utter the dreaded number – eighty. Yet, the hockey season is in full swing in this part of the country. Yes, it is sports fans. I know you believe winter is the proper time to play Hockey up here in da Nort-lahnt. (I learnt dat verd from the linguist at lunch the odder day. U betcha, fur sure, eh.) Technically, it is a winter sport. However, summer is the time for hockey CLINICS. Point of fact, up here there are four seasons. Spring, whenever the temperature stays above zero for more than a week. Road Construction season is the time of year for family vacations far, far away. Fall is Road Construction on steroids because of the month long union strike that annually starts July 5th. Winter, or Vinter, as the locals say, is the time of the year between Labour Day, (Dats da Canadian influence on spelling, fur sure, eh) and Memorial Day. Or whenever there is more than two hundred inches of snow on the ground. Really, measuring snow in inches is a joke, a sick one. Snow is depressing enough, unless you own a large hill, like the Indians who own Spirit Mountain.
Hockey is not limited to the freeze-your-ass-off-cuz-you-didn’t-head-to-Gulf-Shores-when-you-had-the-chance-season-of-the-year. No, it can be played year round.
How did this happen. One (or two) might ask. Like duh. The Valley girls had ah, like well, a change of mind. They stopped dating the blond haired melanoma seeking, surfboard riding Dudes and decided to get bread. No, not bred, bread – money. You know, Moolah, Shekels, filthy lucre. They stopped doing the beach thing and attended the Univ of So Cal, and found themselves nerdy dweebs that ah, like well, did not say ah like well, but rather spoke in a cryptic, pre-computer, dialect. The young college lads hadn’t read the rules, so they didn’t follow them and bit by byte they became millionaires. Or billionaires, ah, like well, whatever.
Meanwhile, the Valley girls …

​(Editor: Deleted graphic material unsuitable even for mature adults.)

​Damn! I hate it when she blows away two great paragraphs of finely crafted obscene material. She does that just to irritate me.
Okay, anyway, the Valley girls are now grandmothers with grandchildren. (I so dislike stating the obvious) These grandchildren need something to occupy their time, keep them off drugs, and out of jail. Enter – Taa-dAA – Hockey Moms. Yes, I know there is no snow in So Cal, but there are rich grandfathers. They need to please the rich grandmothers by …

​(Editor: Enough of the overly graphic stuff, okay?)
 
 (Author: I need a break.)

​Hockey 101 (cont. some more)

​​I was about to say to this is a win, win, and win deal. Grandpa gets to have his name on a building in neon lights. Grandma can brag about her name, on a building, in neon lights. And the mothers (daughters of parents whose name is on a building in neon lights) have a place to hangout with their kids at three in the morning and not have to pay a cover charge or tip the valet parking guys. They get to spend thousands of dollars on hundreds of pounds of hockey equipment that they carry up two flights of stairs while their macho little darlings carry two, one-pound hockey sticks.
A note on hockey sticks, the cheap sticks cost less than thirty-bucks. The expensive ones, are made with the same exotic material as an F-22. They will set you back two hundred smackers, or more. They are made in Tijuana, Mexico. Yes folks, the really good sticks are made south of the border. Jeezs eh, who’d thunk it!
The last win is the kids. These grandsons …

​(Editor: Sexist remark.) 

 and granddaughters
​

​​(Author: There, I hope that makes her happy.)

​… Have a place to play where the sun never shines. The hockey moms have other very important roles to play: chauffeur, trainer, first aid, cheerleader, and fight promoter/stopper.
What, exactly, is a Hockey-Mom? From my observation, they are a sub-set of the female human species. Imagine, if you will, a cross between the tall Amazon woman of legend, and an operatic soprano in a Wagnerian Norse tragedy wearing a white tank top that could be mistaken for a ‘56 Caddie Coupe DeVille with its Dagmarish bumper guards. Okay, they don’t wear a tin cap with cow horns. Then neither do the Minnesota Vikings football team. 

​​(Editor: Lacks relevance.)

​Also, they all wear a foot-long ponytail and it’s blond. Some are, obviously, of the bottle variety, while others are not. It takes an expert to be able to tell the difference. In the main, they are rather nice people. 

​​(Author: See Post Script.)

​So what happened when east met west on the ice at the Marshall High School field house? The youpers took away So Cal’s can of whoop-ass and taught them what the side boards are used for. Namely, injuring and maiming the other team.
 
P.S. I had to add that last sentence. Why? As I was about to send this story to SAM, my editor, to be destroyed by her large red lumber crayon, Lilly, the director of Fun & Games at my hotel, cornered me, literally, in the lobby, and asked what my latest story was about. I, being honest and forthright, foolishly told her all about the story above. Grabbing a handful of my shirt, she lifted me to my tiptoes, squished me farther into the corner as her nose pressed against mine. She looked me straight in the face, and her minty breath said, “Remember Bucko, I am a Hockey Mom!”

​Cement Mixers
​(Author: Not to be confused with the soft-serve confection of the same name.)

​Most of the Motels guests were out having supper. (Don’t you like that vernacular for, you’ve just paid a hundred-fifty bucks to spend one night and you are a guest, wonderful.) The Hockey moms have taken their whiny, sunburnt, pampered brats to one of the local gut-bomb purveyors.
Calling eating at Burger K, or the Golden A’s, a meal, makes me want to up-chuck my own recent repast. I had dined at the Schwarz Hölzer. I had ordered a fifteen syllable something. It cost eighteen-fifty. I could describe the delectable Teutonic bit of gastronomy in lavish terms, but I won’t. It was a hot, open-faced, beef sandwich, of questionable genealogy, with lumpy, out of the box-mashed potatoes. For an additional three bucks, I bought a dessert with an appetizing name. It came with a cute little spoon. Those of beading and class would call I a demitasse spoon. The dessert, according to the server was Apfelkuchen. It was server by the server in a triple tall shot glass. Said spoon curved in such a manner that it was nearly impossible to hold comfortably in either hand. The topping was a teaspoonful of artificial whipped cream, topped with a two drip drizzle of something that looked like chocolate, but wasn’t. Three dips of the demitasse spoon later, the concoction was gone. It, however, was not forgotten, even now, an hour later, every burp reminds me of it.
A boisterous trio interrupted my quiet reverie as they burst through the door onto the patio near where I was sitting. Their attire tagged them as guys who toiled in the heat for their daily sustenance. In other words, they were sweat-stained, T-shirt wearing, out of town, construction workers. The leader, Goldie-Locks, was carrying a large red and white beer cooler. How, you ask, did I know it contained beer? Simple, they didn’t look like tea-sippers. The second guy, fortyish, was wearing a cap with a NASCAR style number 24 on it. He had a deck of playing cards in one hand and a half a bottle of beer in the other. The last member of the group looked to be on the good side of thirty and wore no wedding ring. He sported a week-old, exotically trimmed red beard. He glanced at the unpopulated swimming pool and remarked to his companions about the lack of bikini scenery. Goldie-locks and 24 agreed with red-beard. Faster than I can type, they had the cards shuffled, dealt them, opened their beers, and fired up their cigarettes.
 24 dealt another round of 3-handed Euchre. Red-beard lifted his Okleys and started to drool. The motel limo squealed to a stop and blocked our view of two chicks in bikinis heading to the swimming pool. Red-beard flipped open his rotary dial cell phone and dialed. Moments later, the limo driver emerged from the office. He moved the vehicle just in time for us to watch the bikini bottoms disappear through the green crust covering the pool. They never resurfaced, and the Euchre game continued until 24 announced he’d scored 11 points and won the game. He won because he was keeping score. Next game, new scorekeeper, and he won. Every game of chance has a rhythm. The rhythm of this Euchre game seems to be – the scorekeeper wins. The thirty-pack of beer finished, it was time to call it a day. These men work hard, play hard, and enjoy the moment. The three workers sauntered to their room.
 
I’m forced to add – Duluth is a fun place to visit and has a lot neat things going for it. Someone paid my editor handsomely for forcing me to add that last sentence.

​(Author: I’da done it for half price.)
–  the end –

I wondered who was ringing my doorbell.  I rarely got visitors, let alone at eleven at night. I groggily shuffled to the door. As I passed the mirror, I imagined whoever was on the other side might mistake me as the living dead with the way I was moving. However, once I reached the door and opened it I was confused. No one was there. I stared into the dead of night and then I saw it – the package.
               I reached down and cautiously picked it up as if it might explode at the slightest touch. I looked it over. There was no card or anything to identify the package, nor had I ever heard of any postal service delivering this late. That is when I nearly had to change my pants. My hand had barely touched the box when something inside the box let out a loud bark.
               I had to swallow my heart back into my chest before it leaped from my mouth like the coward I am. However, again, whatever was in the box let out another loud bark. I knew it had to be a dog in the box, but who would leave me a dog. The few people I did interact with knew I was terribly afraid of dogs, however I could not let a living creature stay in that box, so I brought the box inside and opened it praying this was some sort of sick joke.
               A million questions running through my mind. Who would put a dog on my doorstep? Why would they put it in a box? Most importantly, why this hour of the night? Me being the kind soul I am, albeit terrified of what was in the box had to release this animal. Though a stray thought popped in my head. I was always warned about opening unknown mail. Especially in the magical world were the worst things can be in the smallest and most innocent looking places.
               I pulled out my knife and sliced through the tape, keeping the package flaps closed. I removed the knife from the box when the flaps exploded open and the creature that was inside exploded from the package. I flew backwards in fear, knife flying from my hand. I knew I had already made a mistake. As if time slowed down I saw everything happen as if it was happening through the course of years. The creature that burst forth was no dog! It was a thing from hell. I had the appearance of a dog but that was all. The hellish beast was almost magnificent if it weren’t so terrifying.
                  My entire body seized up and I hit the ground. The last thing I saw was my knife falling toward me, as if it was falling in slow motion. I felt the searing pain of my stomach being punctured. My last vision was of the creature starting to consume my body. 

Raised in Western Nebraska, USA, twenty-five year old entrepreneur, artist, writer, and athlete, Jonas Cardona, strives to impact as many people’s hearts, minds, and souls worldwide- by creating inspirational content. After five years in the United States Army, Cardona gave up his career to pursue a new mission.
This young creator focuses primarily on art but has continued to develop his skills in writing, athletics, and graphic design. In the future, Cardona plans to use these skills to create a novel and clothing line. In the meantime, he continues to share art, insightful life stories, fictional stories, along with fitness and health advice.
Cardona’s primary mission is to allow the grace of God to shine through him in creating content that entertains, motivates, inspires, teaches, and excites. His main goal is to ultimately impel others to recognize the power, peace, and happiness within themselves. He knows that the only way to change the world is to change the individual.
Contact via email at jdecardona5634@gmail.com

Shelly sat up from the bed and rotated her head from one side to the other. Matching comforters covered both beds and the orange wallpaper was cracked and faded. The scent of cigarettes and air freshener lingered in the room as flies buzzed around.

The bathroom door across from her opened and a familiar musky cologne entered her nose. A heavyset young man stepped from the bathroom and adjusted his red, striped dress shirt. Then he cupped his mouth, breathed, and sniffed. From the corner of his eye, he noticed that Shelly was up. He looked at her and his face grew red with a smile.

“You're finally awake. I’ve planned a special evening for us,” he said. His voice wavered and drops of sweat formed on his acne-covered face.

“Adam, where are we? How did I get here?” Shelly asked. She stood up and moved toward the door. Before she could reach it, Adam blocked her. 

“Oh.. Don’t worry about that. Can I get you something to drink? I brought us a couple bottles of cola.” 

She reached for the door knob and Adam grabbed her by the wrist. He took ahold of her other arm and moved her backward. Shelly opened her mouth to scream but nothing came out. Adam looked passed her and dragged her toward the back patio. 

Shelly pulled against him, “Please. No, Adam. I want to go home.” Beyond the doorway she observed a table set for two. In the middle, was a bouquet of half-dead red roses inside a white vase. On each side, sat two plates piled with a mixture of elbow noodles, ground beef, and tomatoes. Flies swarmed the food and roaches crawled along the edges of the high fence. The smell of garlic and cologne sat in the air. 

Adam grabbed her by both hands and looked into her eyes, “Ever since the first day I saw you, I knew you would be a special person in my life. I haven’t been the same since you stopped and sat with me at the diner to talk. So, I planned the perfect date for you and I.”

Shelly yanked her hands from his, “Look, Adam, I was just trying to be nice and you always give me a really good tip so it’s the least I could do. You seem like a nice guy but I don’t like you like that. I’m sorry but I have to leave.”

“Do you realize what I had to do to set this up?” he said. He turned toward the table, grabbed the vase, and heaved it through the window. Glass scattered throughout the room and roses laid across the hard, brown carpet. 

Shelly stepped backward and moved inside the room. As soon as she made it in, she turned around and ran for the door. Adam chased after her and wrapped his hands around her waist. She reached for the knob and got pulled away. Shelly looked down and grabbed a piece of glass. With a shard of glass in hand, she turned around and threw her arm downward at Adam.

Adam grabbed her forearm as the tip of the glass almost touched his throat. Adam pushed her against the wall and snatched the glass from her. He put his body against hers and covered her mouth. Adam turned the shard around and pressed the tip of it against her stomach. 

Shelly put her hands on his shoulders and pushed. She shook her head to uncover her mouth but all that could be heard were muffled gasps. The glass pinched harder the more she fought. She reached over and pried his fingers away from her mouth, “ I love you.” 

The pressure from the glass released, “You do? Then why did you run from me?” Adam said.

Shelly placed her hands on his chest, “I was just nervous because no one has ever done this for me before.” She went on her tippy toes and gave his cheek a gentle kiss. “I’ll take that cola now,” she said and gave him a wink. 

Adam dropped his arm and released the glass shard. He smiled, turned around, and rushed for her drink. Shelly followed right behind him and in the middle of the room laid the white vase. Adam reached for the cola and Shelly reached for the vase. He popped the cap off and Shelly bashed him in the head. White pieces of ceramic flew through the air and Adam crashed to the ground. Shelly ran for the door, opened it, and never stopped. ​

​Marina slid the tincture bottles into her traveling kit. Packets of feverfew and yarrow lay on the table beside it. Across from her, Janna Colesway, Master Healer of Tirlew Keep and the surrounding town, folded her arms, leaning her hip on the table.
“You’re going to destroy your reputation. I thought you had better sense,” she said.
“We both took an oath to the Healer’s Guild – you know why I am going.” Marina didn’t like Janna very much personally, but she respected her skill as a healer.
Janna’s eyes narrowed. “The Bog Men are no better than layabouts and horse-thieves.”
Marina tried logic. “If this outbreak of the Bog-Fever spreads to the town or the Keep, it could be deadly. Better we stop it before it spreads.”
“Better we should turn the Bog-Men out of town,” Janna scowled. “Let them treat themselves with dirty water and bog-grass.” As Marina snapped her case shut, Janna straightened. “If you walk out that door, don’t expect to come back. If you choose the Boggies over respectable folks, you might as well stay with them.”
Marina stared at her. It really wasn’t up to Jenna to decide; the Guild had sent her and the Guild paid both their wages. But would she want to come back to this?
“Fine,” she said. In light of Jenna’s decree she detoured to her sleeping alcove and stuffed a few trinkets, extra clothes and her precious herbal into a pack. She tucked her brown braid under a hat, grabbed her cloak and left without looking back.
The village streets were empty; the crowd that had gathered to taunt the Bog-Man had dispersed. Marina slipped around the grange hall to the shed that was used as a rustic gaol. Usually it only housed the occasional rowdy drunk.
She expected to have to bribe the guard, but evidently the mob who had thrown the stranger there hadn’t thought it necessary to keep a watch. The door was stout and well fitted and the bar across the outside sturdy: still it was the work of a few moments to lift it aside and open the door.
The prisoner stood just inside, tense and wary. A tear in his threadbare linen shirt revealed dark bruises down his side. A trickle of blood from his nose had dried in a dark streak. His eyes were brown like her own, but much darker, and his hair was black against coppery skin. Even with her skin brown from the summer sun, his was several shades darker.
She tried for a reassuring smile. “I am Marina. I’m Guild Healer. I know you came looking for medicine for the Bog-Fever. I want to help.”
He flicked a glance behind her, braced for a trick – mockery or more blows. Marina stepped aside so he could see that there was no one there.
“You want to help?” he asked, looking back at her. He had a faint accent – lengthened vowels and thickened consonants. “You must be new here. Your people do not help the Uselda.”
“The Uselda?” Marina asked.
“The People of the Marsh, whom you call Bog-Men.” He drew himself up proudly. “We lived in the marsh before the Men of the North came down with their swords and their horses. We lived there before the Ocilla of the South came with their spears and their stone roads. The North and South mingle in the fields, but in the marshes the Uselda keep to the old ways.”
Marina stared, startled by the condensation of thousands of years of history into his brief statement. After a moment, she said, “Well, I swore to help any who need my services.”
“It will not please the people here. They call us thieves and liars.”
 “I am not from here and I have yet to see any evidence of what they accuse you of.”
He cocked his head to the side, eyes narrowed, considering her.
“I have meadowsweet, peppermint, feverfew, yarrow and foxfinger in my kit,” she said.
He hesitated a moment longer, then said, “I came to buy the foxfinger.”
Marina tightened her lips. “I understand that you have little reason to trust me, but I assure you that I am serious. I have taken an oath to heal where I am needed, I will not break that oath because of a local prejudice.”
He considered and then he bowed in a formal gesture. “I am Córris. I accept your offer.”
They left the town by the river path, avoiding the few people who were out. Most were at the midday meal and they were able to leave unmolested by suspicious villagers.
Córris led the way, pushing past thick shrubs until he reached the gravely river bank. She glanced around, wondering where they could go from there – the river stretched wide: green under the shade of the trees and glinting golden-brown under the sun. Before she could ask, Córris pulled a roll of thick leather and a round wooden frame from the willows beside the bank. With quick motions he bound the leather to the frame and flipped the whole contraption over. He set the coracle in the shallows of the river and held out his hand to her to help her board.
She looked at the tiny, flimsy boat in dismay, and then met Córris eyes. The set of his mouth was impassive, but the tilt of his eyebrow held a hint of mockery. She swallowed and allowed him to help her sit on the plank laid across the width of the boat. He took up a paddle which had lain at the center of the leather bundle and shoved at the shallow bank. With a spin they glided out into the current of the river.
The banks grew thick with purple and gold iris and the river ran lazily between them. Beyond a curving green wall of willow, Marina saw the stretching blue of Lake Eelswell.
“When was your village stricken with the Fever?” Marina asked after a long silence.
Córris glanced at her. “Twelve days saw the first sicken, but it has spread quickly. Seven died already and more are close. We have used our supply of foxfinger and the onsela, our healer is stricken with the fever and cannot prepare more.”
“How many are sick?”
“There are fifty-three. That is a third of our village – we are very worried.”
Marina pressed her hand to his arm. “I will help, Córiss. I am a very good healer.”
Their boat wound through tickets of reeds, where jeweled dragonflies hovered over the still green water. Then they entered into twisting channels between tufts of sedge grass and stands of willow and alder. Water-lilies floated serenely in the larger pools. Birds drifted over them or stood long-legged in the shallows, supremely unconcerned by the silent coracle slipping past. Marina slowly sank into the great hush that underlay their soft calls.
She slipped into a reverie where, through half-closed eyes, a pale light edged everything around them. Green-gold shot through the reeds and willows, and the lilies each held a flicker of fire. However, when she glanced at Córiss she started. She could see a rosy-golden glow about him – strong and vital. She stared eyes wide.
“What is wrong?” he asked, noticing her look.
She shut her eyes and opened them again. The strange light had vanished. She took a breath. “Nothing’s wrong, I was sun-dazzled for a moment.”
He frowned. “We are nearly there.”
Shortly, they passed a small island with a copse of willows at one end. As they rounded the green trailing branches, Mariana saw the Uselda village.
It rose from the marsh itself: an erratic network of houses joined by rope and plank bridges. Some were built on small islands, but most were built on platforms that stood on pilings or floated, raft-like, on the shallow water. They headed for the largest island that had two buildings on it: a hall made of wooden planks with a thatched roof and a small stone cottage skirted by a garden of herbs and flowers. Córris raised his hands and gave a hooting cry.  He steered toward the dock. The door to the hall opened and a woman stepped out, a man peering over her shoulder. Córris called out to them in a liquid tongue, the only word of which Marina understood was “Marina.” She stared at him in astonishment. It had not occurred to her that the Usleda would speak a different language.
At his words, the man in the door of the hall started forward, his face brightening with hope, but the woman frowned darkly and spat a series of questions at Córiss. He responded, but his words brought little change to her expression.
She looked at Marina and spoke with a strong accent: “You be foolish to come, healer. Your people be not pleased.”
Marina’s chin came up. “If your need was great enough need to send Córiss to Tirlew, knowing how they would treat him, than you should not dismiss my help. I am a Guild Healer and the oath I took does not preclude the Uselda because the people of Tirlew dislike them.”
The woman studied her for a moment, said something to Córiss and turned back to the hall. He lithely disembarked, and then he held out his hand to assist Marina.
“What did she say?” Marina asked.
He smiled with a brief flash of white teeth. “Aline said ‘If she be foolish, it is her affair.’”
The hall had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Despite the rustic conditions, the room was clean and well aired, though heavy with the scents of sickness. Marina was dismayed at how many pallets lay on the floor. Men and women, silver-haired elders and babes-in-arms lay there. The woman said something to Córiss as they entered, and he nodded.
 “I will take you to the onsela, Faela” he said. “Aline tells me she does very poorly.”
He led her out and across the stream into the stone hut. Inside the wooden furniture was carved with leaves and flowers, roots and birds. Arched windows, glazed with thick, rippled glass let the light stream in. Wall shelves held tidy jars, and bunches of herbs hung from the rafters, filling the air with a spicy fragrance. A boy of fourteen carefully poured hot liquid into earthenware cups set on a tray. He looked up as Marina entered. She could see the dark circles under his eyes. Córiss, coming in behind her, spoke to him. To Marina he said, “This is Parrin, our healer’s apprentice.” Then he asked the boy, “How is Faela?”
Parrin looked at Marina and answered carefully. “She be worser, Córris. We gave her gigala but it will not work.”
 “Gigala is what you call ‘foxfinger.’” Córris told Marina. He led her to the back of the room where an old woman lay, still and quiet, her copper skin ashen and her breath barely visible.
Marina pressed her fingers to the base of the woman’s throat; her pulse was erratic as the fever burned at her heart.
She looked at the young apprentice who stood near. “Her heart struggles,” she said through Córris’ translation. “You have not been able to stabilize it with the foxfinger?”
Parrin shook his head. “I fear to give it her more. I gave her the most for safty.” He looked at Córris “Aline says use the last placwyrt but I cannot. I will surely kill her.”
“Go get it,” said Córiss.
“What is placwyrt?” Marina asked.
Córiss hesitated. “It is a medicine we can no longer make. It is a cure for the Bog-Fever, but very dangerous. Harder even to dose then the foxfinger.”
Parrin returned and held out a small ceramic jar. Córiss opened it. Marina gasped. Pale green light spilled out of the jar, casting eerie color on Córiss’ face and hands.
“What is that?” Marina stared.
Córiss looked at Parrin. “I will be responsible to dose her.”
The boy’s relief was palpable. He moved around the bed to open the healer’s mouth. Córiss picked up a drip wand and scraped it across the bottom of the pot. He lifted it out. One drip of emerald fire clung to the tip. He dripped it into Faela’s mouth.
Marina gasped again. Emerald fire shot through the faint rosy glow that clung to Faela. Marina could almost hear the woman’s heartbeat fluctuate with the strange the force of it. Córiss scraped another drop, but Marina grabbed his hand. “Another dose like that could kill her.”
Córiss looked sharply at her. “How can you tell?”
“Can’t you see it?” Marina put her fingers over the healer’s pulse. The pattern was slowing, the emerald fire fading taking the heart beat with it. “Give it to her now.”
Córiss dropped the drop in Faela’s mouth. Her heart jolted under Marina’s fingers, but then steadied. This time the green light faded to a pale gold. “Good,” said Marina, absently. After a moment she lifted her fingers. “I think she’ll be all right now.”
She looked up to find Córiss and Parrin staring at her.
 “You are a saras?” Córiss asked. “I did not know such existed among your people.”
Marina frowned. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“The power to see health of a person, to use saras – how would you say it? Sorcery?”
“Magic?” Marina laughed. “I’m not a conjuror if that’s what you mean. I just...” What had happened? She had seen – could still see – that faint light. “It’s never happened before,” she said. “I could see what the medicine was doing to her, but I swear I’ve never seen it before.”
Parrin said something. Córiss looked thoughtful and nodded. “He thinks you might have the gift but could not use it outside the Marsh.”
“Why would that make a difference?”
“We are taught that the saras is in the water that comes from the Forest. If you have been far from that source you might not have known you could use it. One of our hunters has the gift of saras. He can understand the speech of birds and beasts, but few now are born with such gifts. I myself have a gift of seeing into people. It helped me learn your tongue, for I hear more than just the words. Once many of our people were saras, because we live at brink of the Allou – the great Forest. But now the Forest fades and the saras fades as well.”
Marina frowned as he spoke, looking at her own hands. After a moment she began to see the rosy gold light about her own skin.
The door to the cottage opened suddenly and Aline entered. She spoke urgently to Córiss.
“We are needed in the hall,” Córiss said. “Bring the foxfinger.”
The vision of light faded as Marina grabbed her kit and hurried after him toward the hall.
 ###
When Córiss pushed her onto a bench and pressed a cup of hot broth into her hands, Marina noticed how dark the hospital hall had become.
The hours since she had tended the healer had disappeared in a blur of tending the other patients. She had all but used up her foxfinger, and yet only five people had responded to it. Three others had not: their weak hearts faltered and faded. Some were too ill to even try to save. She had tried over and over to break the fever with less dangerous methods, and then to keep the patients warm enough when the inner heat weakened. As they worked, four more cases arrived.
Marina was appalled to see her hands shaking as she took the broth. She sipped it gratefully. “How is the healer, Faela?” she asked Córiss.
“Her fever broke an hour ago,” he answered, quietly. “Your gift saved her life.” He looked as tired as she felt. “Aline has made you a bed at the onsela’s. You should come and rest. You will be no help if you work too hard.”
Marina might have protested, but as she stood her head swam and only his swift hand at her elbow kept her upright. “Let me look on Tannis again, then I will go,” she said.
He led her to a corner where a young mother lay cradling her sick baby. Though still weak and pale, the mother had rallied to the foxfinger. However Tannis, her baby, was too young for the drug. Marina smiled at the mother, but her heart sank. The child was slipping away. She let Córris lead her across the dark islet and into the cottage.
When she woke, morning brightened the sky. Marina lifted her head from her pallet and saw that the healer, Faela, lay propped up as Aline fed her spoonfuls of broth.
Marina sat up, reaching for her gown folded on a stool beside her. Both women looked over. Aline came and helped Marina with her laces and then produced a wooden comb.
“Córiss?” Marina asked, hopefully, as she untangled and re-braided her hair.
“Aya,” Aline nodded and hurried to the door. Marina went to the healer’s bed.
The old woman had closed her eyes, but opened them at Marina’s approach. “I give you thanks,” Faela said, carefully. “Aline tells me.”
“Don’t speak – save your strength,” said Marina. “But you are welcome.” She touched the frail hand that lay on the coverlet, relieved to find a steady pulse beneath the fragile skin.
“Aline tells me Córris thinks you are saras?”
Marina hesitated. “So he guessed when I helped give you the medicine. I never experienced anything like that before.”
“Aya,” Faela nodded. “Outside the saras is weak. Even here it is weak. But not so much.”
The door opened and Córiss entered, followed by Aline who brought Marina a bowl of rice and honey and sweet hazelnuts. Córiss knelt by the bed and pressed Faela’s hand to his cheek. She spoke quietly but quickly to him. He glanced from Faela to Marina, hope dawning on his face.
“The herb, the placwyrt you used yesterday.” He paused, thinking a moment. “It would be called Blackfoil in your tongue. Like you saw, is an old cure for the Bog-fever. But only a saras healer can prepare it and must also give the dose even more carefully foxfinger. We do not even gather it anymore, for without saras, it cannot be prepared. But Faela thinks you can do this. She knows the way to prepare it, but has not the gift to do it herself.”
Faela squeezed Marina’s hand. “You find the placwyrt. I teach you the culling of it.”
“How shall I know it?” said Marina.
“Parrin knows it – but I tell you.” she switched to Usleda and Córris translated. “The leaves are spikes – like the iris, but small and thin. The flower looks like birthroot with three petals, but small and very dark purple – so dark as to look black.”
Marina stared at her. “I do know the plant you mean. In my tongue it called death-spike lily. But it is a deadly poison. There are no cures to have of it.” She glanced at the bottle Córiss had dosed Faela with the day before.
 Faela nodded, “Poison, aya. Only in your hands a cure. I can help – I know much of the old lore, the measure of our skills before the loss of the saras.”
Marina thought of the patients in the hall – the children struggling to breathe, the young mother cradling her babe. She took a breath. “I will try the blackfoil.”
###
Thin fingers of mist twisted through the reeds under a silvery sky. Marina was relieved that they traveled in a larger boat this time - made of sturdy planks, rather than the thin hide of the coracle. Parrin sat at the prow, and Córris worked the oars. They wound through the baffling labyrinth of reeds, until at last they came out to a wide pool fringed with flowers and sweet scented herbs. Córris beached them on a strip of sandy bank. Parrin led the way to a patch of the deadly lilies. He handed Marina a knife made of obsidian. Córris repeated his words to Marina:
“No metal must touch the flowers. It makes the poison stronger and, what is the word? Fickle? Do not cut the ones that are closed, for the poison runs too strong in their sap, nor the ones that are withered, for the poison sickens as they die.”
Parrin handed her a pair of leather gloves and a flat lidded basket. Marina knelt down and studied the flowers. She thought of the page in her herbal for the Death-Spike Lily:
“A drop of the juice shall kill a man” read the entry. “Even the dead and dried plant contains deadly poison. Let it not be cast upon a fire for the fumes shall smother all near. If it is used on arrows to kill, let not the meat be eaten for the poison will make it unwholesome. Should it sprout in the garden, let it be dug away in the winter when the poison diminishes and let it be buried deeply, so that it may not grow back.”
“Lady guide me,” she whispered. Then she looked at the dark flowers in that way she was learning - a little to the side, a little out of focus. She could see a faint aura of light about them, a sickly yellow green that pulsed with menace to her senses. It shone more brilliant about the tightly furled buds, while the color lessened as they opened and dank gray clung to the old ones. She carefully cut six flowers – each perfectly balanced between brilliant green and gray.
As they wound their way back through the marsh, she continued to look sideways at everything they passed, wondering what other cures existed that this new sight could reveal.
She turned her head to watch the glittering flight of a small marsh bird, and then froze. On the far side of the wide pool they crossed she could see something moving in the stretch of mud. The ground rippled and heaved and there was a sharp silver light breaking through. She caught Córiss’s arm and pointed.  Córris thrust his paddle into her hands and yanked his bow from his shoulder, fitting an arrow to the string. The mud cracked and split open. Marina clutched at the side of the boat. A large, hairless head rose up. It had pale grey skin and a wide mouth filled sharp needle-like teeth. Its eyes looked blind under milky membranes, but it turned toward them, pointed ears swiveling. A bony hand with long nails reached out of the mud.
Córiss let an arrow fly as the creature opened its mouth wider and began to let out a keening sound. It flew true – straight into the gaping mouth and Marina squeaked as the creature jerked back, and then fell to the side. A trickle of dark blood dripped onto the mud.
Parrin said something in an admiring tone of voice and Córris nodded fervently. He took the paddle back from Marina and the boat shot back into the reeds. Marina took a deep breath.
Córiss looked at her. “Are you well?”
“Startled,” she said. “What was that?”
“A grynim, “grey-eater” or “grey-biter” would be the closest in your tongue. They live in the mud where the trees of the Allou have fallen. Their bite carries poison, and sometimes they swarm. Then they can tear a full grown buck to pieces in minutes. Cold iron cuts them, but we have little of that in the marsh. With your warning I made a lucky shot, just as it called to the others.”
Marina stared at him, and shivered.
###
By the time Marina had completed the decoction of the blackfoil she as exhausted as after a week of examinations at the Collegia Medica. It had taken hours of painstaking preparations: First she boiled the plant in five changes of water, before taking the sixth distillation and letting it cool to blood warm. Then she had added apple vinegar, which reacted violently. Once it had subsided, the she filtered the liquid through a layer of clean charcoal, and then mixed it with spirits of wine. At each step Marina had to minutely describe the auras she saw, as Feala described though Córiss what she should look for. Her head began to pound before she was halfway done. Yet she thrilled to see the ugly yellow-green of the blackfoil slowly mellow into a deeper true green - an intense color, but no longer unwholesome.
At last, as she decanted the liquor from the top layer of their beaker into the waiting bottle, she felt a sense of triumph. Faela insisted on being carried with them as they hurried to the hall. Marina went straight to the baby, Tannis. She lay limp and still in her mother’s arms, her tiny heart barely fluttering, the ugly red rash gone from her skin leaving her pale and wan.
“By your leave,” Marina said. The young mother nodded at Córiss’ translation.
Marina carefully dipped the wand into the bottle and let a drop fall into the baby’s mouth. The whole hall held its breath. Nothing. The child’s aura was as pale as her skin, the brilliant green of the potion making no change. Another drop and another. Then the blackfoil reached the baby’s laboring heart and green light flared across her aura. The flare subsided and to Marina’s joy the child’s heart stuttered, then picked up an even rhythm. A measure of rosy-gold returned to her aura and for the first time in hours she let out a thin, weak cry. Her mother burst into tears.
Marina didn’t wait to comfort her. She hurried across the room to fall on her knees beside an old man whose breath rattled in his chest, as he stared into the distance with glassy eyes. Yet she had to take a moment to dash the tears from her own eyes as she leaned over to treat him.
###
Marina sat in the sun, watching the Uselda rowing to and fro. Córiss came to sit beside her. “Hala,” she greeted him, using one of the words she had learned in his language.
He returned the greeting. “What did the Baron’s message say?” he asked her.
“He is to have a new healer sent to the Keep. One who will not challenge their customs.”
“He is a fool,” said Córris. “There has not been a healer of your gift these many years.”
“Without the lore that I have learned from the Uselda my gift is useless,” she answered. “The University has nothing left of the arts of magic in its teaching. I do not blame them; they care for what works now, not legends from the past. Yet, for whatever reason, I can learn from those legends and now that I know that, a door is open to me that I cannot close.”
Córiss picked up her hand and turned it palm up. “I once met an old man, one of the Wandering Folk, who showed me once how to read fortunes. Shall I read yours?”
She laughed. “Like the fortune-teller at a Faire? Yes, tell me what I should do.”
He squinted over the lines on her hand. “You should travel,” he said, presently. “You should gather the knowledge of saras-healing before it is gone.” He sat quiet for a moment. The air grew very still. When he looked up, there was a silvery depth to his eyes and, for a moment, they were as deep as the midnight sky. “You will heal someone who will be far from their hearth and home. In this healing you will help to restore the Allou and return the light to the water.”
She stared at him. He shook his head as if to clear it. Then he shrugged. “That is what I see. Remember I have a touch of the saras too.” he said lightly, as she continued to stare.
“What you see,” she repeated. She laughed. “A door I cannot close indeed,” she said.
                                                                 END

​ 
I never knew Cornelius would end up a prostitute. He was a young boy everyone loved in Abesan Estate, a very well mannered boy. As a young boy he came into my house to play with my older brother  Pelumi, who taught him how to count with his fingers, and they read the ' pussy cat,pussy cat' rhyme together.
Pelumi was two years older than Cornelius and my age-mate, but when Cornelius became a man, a prostitute, everything turned around. He distance himself from Pelumi because he thought it shameful if Pelumi got to know about it,but Pelumi knew when Cornelius became a prostitute, yet never said a word about it,neither did he call Cornelius siblings to tell them what their brother had become, a prostitute.
 Cornelius parents were well known in Abesan Estate, the biggest housing estate built by the Lagos State Government in the early eighties. His mother was a primary school teacher who taught history in the only  government primary school in Abesan Estate for many years while his father was an Engineer for a French company in Lagos before he left for Germany when Cornelius was just five.
 Many neighbours knew about his trip because he told us a night before his trip to Germany, knocking at everyone’s door,  pleading that we keep an eye on his family especially his children. A little party was held in his house before he left and my father drove Cornelius father to the airport the night he flew to Germany.
After his father traveled to Germany, his mother became very hard working, opened a small kiosk downstairs their house, to support her family after school hours. She sold soft drinks,biscuits, and children exercise books. Many who came to buy things from her loved the way Cornelius behaved, attended to customers.Cornelius would stand up before his siblings did, and often helped customers to carry what they bought from his mother’s shop to their homes.
As a young child, Cornelius was always seen riding his bicycle round the estate with some of his friends, helping those returning back home after the day's work with whatever they had with them  . Many parents in the estate liked him because of his good behaviour and whenever their children did something wrong ,they told them
'Why can’t you learn from Cornelius, be a good boy like him.'
He was never disrespectful as a young child, he paid attention to whatever any adults told him and many were very pleased to welcome him into their home as a child, because his behaviour sometimes rub off on their children.He also made the children in the neighbourhood laugh a lot, even me, with the kind of jokes he made. It was in my house  Cornelius first watched Coming to America . After watching the film , he stood on the table of my parents sitting room and started making gestures of Akeem in Coming to America. Everyone in the sitting –room laughed loudly including my mother.
'One can take you for Akeem, only you are not as tall as him. You are still a young kid.' My mother said teasingly
When Cornelius  grew older he fell in love with football.He played with most of his mates at Pius Ikedia field ,the only football pitch in Abesan Estate named after a football striker who played for the Nigeria's Super Eagles in the late nineties.Cornelius was also a striker like Pius Ikedia, he joined the junior football team in the Estate at the age of twelve, and many estate residents often go to pius Ikedia field during weekends just to watch Cornelius play football because of the fun he brought with him whenever he played football.He encouraged me to come watch him play, and whenever I went to watch Cornelius play football, I always sat beside Pelumi who prefers to play basketball rather than football.
Whenever Cornelius scored a goal during any football match, the crowd will run to the football pitch to carry him up telling him he is the next football star of the Nigerian golden eaglet,but when Cornelius had a serious knee injury at age thirteen, Doctors advised him to stay off football for sometime. When his knee got healed, Cornelius had already lost interest in football, even after many encouragement and persuasion from his family and many estate resident, he just refuse to go back to play football.
Before Cornelius finished his secondary education, his mother died of cancer. The whole neighbourhood rallied round Cornelius and his siblings for the burial. Cornelius cried for days and refused to eat. Many neighbours came to beg him to eat , encouraging him to look forward to brighter days, he was very close to his mother before her death.
Their father after the burial sent money regularly, which was used to send Cornelius and his siblings to a private school in Lagos. He also wrote several letters to his Children through my fathers' post office box which my father delivered to Cornelius sister whenever he received it. His elder sister made sure her siblings lacked nothing, she got a job at a Pharmaceutical company after graduating from University to support her siblings, the family. The Pharmaceutical company paid his sister good money which allowed her to take her siblings out every weekend.
A year after, Cornelius sister got married, it was a big wedding. She married an Engineer who lived at Ibadan, they met at a big wedding party in Lagos.  Cornelius father came down from Germany to give his daughter's hand in marriage, he also thanked the whole neighbourhood for taking care of his family after the death of his wife.He left few days after the wedding, Cornelious eldest brother drove their father to the airport.
Three years after Cornelius sister got married, his two elder brothers also got married and moved out of their flat. Their father didn't come home but sent money down to make their weddings spectacular, supporting his sons' weddings, though he knew they were capable to organise it themselves since they were both working. He was married to a German woman and he was working so hard to sustain his new family that was why he couldn’t come to Nigeria for his sons' weddings.
During his University years, studying Business Administration at University of Lagos, many friends of Cornelius missed him in the Estate, including my brother Pelumi, who had that time was working in a bank in Lagos Cornelius moved from his sister’s hosue in Ibadan to his two older brother’s house, always spending his holidays with them and their house remained shut until he finished school.
 It was after Cornelius finished from University of Lagos, when his father no longer sent money from Germany, Cornelius began prostitution.
He searched for  job in Lagos for more than two years without laying hands on one. He couldn’t depend on his elder ones because they have their new families to cater for. When he became frustrated with begging for money, begging for food in the neighbourhood, he began to think of what to do to sustain himself, it was then one of the bad guys in estate introduced him to prostitution, telling him rich married women, who no longer consider their husband desirable can offer him a better life.At first he refused because of the way and manner in which he was brought up , but when he became frustrated of his economic conditions, he decided to give in.
Cornelius stayed out late at night in the bar opposite his house. I never knew what he discussed  with the  people who came in and out of the bar but I knew it ended up in a huge laughter. Whenever he came back home, he was always talking to someone on his mobile phone, talking loudly, disturbing the neighbourhood with his conversations.
He had friends who sometimes come to live with him and they always talked about a lot of things into the night whenever his friends came.The neighbours always heard their discussions even from their flats. One day when my father wanted to go caution him, my mother prevented him from doing so
‘You know he is grow up now, there are some things you can easily scold a child for but not an adult.’
‘Then I should call his siblings to talk to him,the boy is becoming different these days.’
‘I think you shouldn’t be the first to do so, other people will raise eyebrows at us and remember we also have our own children.’
That ended the discussion and neither my mother or father ever discussed about Cornelius or the loud noise that comes from his flat whenever his friends visited.
 
****************************************
One night, on my way back from work, I saw Cornelius taking an older woman into his flat,the woman was old enough to be his mother. She got down from a Lexus jeep and followed Cornelius. I was on my way back from work when I saw them and for the first time I greeted Cornelius and he didn’t respond.He seemed to be consumed with what he was telling the woman. They held hands as Cornelius led her up into his flat.
In a short while, soft whispering was coming out of Cornelius flat, the woman pleading for more.  There was power cut, and their tone was raised high like a rhythm. She must have enjoyed it because when she came downstairs, they were both smiling, even in the dark, one could see their smiles easily. The woman squeezed some thousand naira notes into Cornelius right hand before she drove off. Cornelius watched the car as it speed off before going into the bar.
The men inside the bar hailed Cornelius when he came in, one after the other, telling him to come sit down beside them Cornelius sat in the middle of the bar ,where he gained the attention of everyone. He ordered that someone buy him a bottle of beer if they wanted to know what happened between the woman and him. One man quickly offered, putting his hands into the pocket of his shirt, as he went to pay the bar man. The bar man brought a bottle of beer to Cornelius, he drank to half bottle, placed the beer on the table in front of him, before began to speak
 ' She lives at GRA Ikeja, I met her at Ikeja Shopping mall, it was there she took interest in me because of my physique. She called me everyday and one day she invited me to a hotel around Ikeja, and that was where we had our first night together. She has been coming back since then, I am so sure she likes my taste.' Cornelius said laughing loudly.
'Is she not married ?' , the man that bought Cornelius a bottle of beer asked in a very curious manner
' Of-course she is married, it is not only men that are promiscuous , some women are not just satisfied with their husband after marriage. I have  three of them with me.'
'Cor-ne-lius!' The bar man shouted as Cornelius shouted at him angrily
' What have I done?’
'At your age you should go look for a job that is worthy no matter how small it is, but you   graduates of nowadays, immediately you finish school you want everything .’ the bar man said
'Where is the job, don’t you know you have to know a big man or woman in Lagos  to get a good job.If I give you my CV, will you get a bank job for me?' Cornelius asked the barman angrily.'
'That is what I have just said, I know you have big dreams but you must learn to start somewhere, no matter how small it is as long as it is a clean job, that brings you integrity and respect.Cornelius these days you have changed, you are no longer the young kid everyone loved  when you were growing up.'
‘Don’t spoil my business for me o., if you want me to continue to come here. I am not a small boy which you can easily advise. I have sense to think and do my things my own way.' Cornelius said angrily
'You are right.' The barman said before laughing loudly to wade his statement off. He didn’t want to offend Cornelius because he is a good customer who made his bar lively whenever he came in. Because of him many came into the beer parlour to listen to his jokes. Cornelius phone began to beep, he looked at and took his eyes away but  his phone continued ringing
'This woman should leave me alone, I am not fucking you tonight.' He said loudly, his statement not directed to anyone in the beer parlour
Everyone in the bar looked at him, Cornelius looked at the guy who bought him a bottle of beer
 'The only problem I have with this woman calling me is that, her whala is too much .’
Cornelius phone continues to beep, as he refused to pick it up. The bar man went to meet him   'Pick your phone, don’t disturb other customers with it.'
' I don't want to pick it. If I pick her call, she will tell me to come to VGC tonight. She is never satisfied with one round. Her children are studying in the United states, her husband must have gone to visit them that is why she is calling me persistently.'
'Then why are you dating her?' A man asked loudly in the bar
'I am not dating her, am only following her because of her money. ‘Cornelius said loudly
'Your Sugar Mummy.' The man told Cornelius and everyone in the bar laughed loudly, including Cornelius after which he sipped the beer in front of him.
Cornelius didn't pick the woman's call. Two days after, the woman came to Cornelius flat banging his door shouting
 'Cornelius please open the door. I beg you in the name of God please open the door. I know you are inside this flat, please open the door, I won’t leave until I see you.'
After a while, when neighbours began to peep from their windows, others gathering close to his flat, climbing the staircase, he opened the door, allowed her in, and closed it back immediately. A bird perched on the railing beside his door making beautiful sound, attracting passers-by to stare at it, look at Cornelius door.
Cornelius shouted at the woman never to bang his door again. Later, we began to hear  soft tones, it was obvious he was making love with the woman, the woman’s ecstasy was very loud, as she begged Cornelius for more.
 When he was done, the two of them came out smiling , talking to each other as Cornelius escorted her to her car. Neighbours stared at the tall, dark woman from their houses. She had a Brazilian weave-on, wore a long kaftan gown that covered her body, her smile concentrated on Cornelius face, with great satisfaction. She gave him two bundles of five hundred naira notes before she drove off in her Peugeot car.
A week after, the woman came with a plasma television and a cable. Cornelius house lightened in a new form. The woman came in frequently and one day after lying to her husband that she was going to china on a business trip, she slept inside Cornelius house for many nights, both in each others arms. Neighbours began to whisper in little tones, when seen in twos’, that Cornelius was keeping his Sugar Mummy inside his house.
When the woman heard of it, she rented a big apartment for Cornelius at Victoria Island. It was well furnished .She got a job for Cornelius at a new generation bank in Lagos, to keep him busy from other women and when her husband travelled to United States to visit their children, she stayed in Cornelius apartment for many days.
Cornelius became very serious with his Sugar Mummy, left the other women for her,and no longer came to the Estate to visit his old friends.
His Sugar Mummy bought him a brand new Chevrolet Camaro to cruise with, as she warmed her way into his heart. Cornelius in appreciation made sure he satisfied her whenever she came around and sometimes they ended up in five star hotels which she lavishly paid for in Lagos.
His Sugar Mummy also got him a visa to the United States when he was on leave and when they both visited , they stayed in a five star hotel which she paid for . It was when his Sugar Mummy’s husband caught them that everything turned around.
The husband of Cornelius Sugar Mummy found out from one of his wife’s close friend that his wife was cheating on him , dating another man. The man couldn’t believe it , because for the many years he and his wife have  being together as married couples , he has never cheated on his wife , and he saw no reason for his wife to cheat on him. With the confession of his wife’s close friend, he decided to find out.
 
A week after she told her husband that she was going for another trip in China, but she left for Cornelius house that night. Cornelius and his Sugar mummy were both in each other’s arms when they heard a loud noise at the door
‘Are you expecting someone, so you have being cheating on me when am not around?’
‘I am not cheating on you and I don’t know the person knocking at the door.’
When Cornelius wore his short to go see who is at the door , his sugar mummy followed him, she wore a small under-wear to cover her naked body, very angry hoping Cornelius hidden secret would be revealed. Cornelius opened the door with his sugar mummy right behind him, she was shocked when she saw her husband.
‘ Folakemi, so this is what you have being doing when you tell me and your daughter that you are travelling to China, the arms of another man is your China!’
Cornelius Sugar – mummy knelt down immediately , pleading with her husband, holding his trousers
‘Please forgive me, it is the work of the devil, it is the work of the devil.’
‘For twenty-five years of marriage , I have never being unfaithful to you, not even once. What have I done to deserve this?’ the man asked in anger.
‘Please forgive me, it’s the devil.’
‘Don’t return back to our house again, this is where you belong.’ he said before looking at Cornelius face.
'And you I will make sure I reduce you to nothing in Lagos.You think you can sleep with my wife and I will allow you get away with it, I will make sure you are left with nothing.'
The woman burst out crying as her husband left ,Cornelius sat down speechless , not knowing what to say. He knew his Sugar-mummy's husband meant what he said,he has connections in high places. Cornelius was scared not knowing what next would happen to him.
 

​"Two beds.  Can you believe this, baby?"  George gestured at the offending pieces of furniture, which sat there silently and took the abuse.  The tastelessly striped blankets drooped forlornly over them, like a sheet laid over a recently deceased hospital patient. 
     Joan laughed dryly.  "Why, Mister Campbell, were you hoping to share a bed with me tonight?  That just wouldn't be proper, sleeping next to a married man."  She picked at the corner of the tablecloth.
     George twisted the gold wedding band off his finger and put it down on the dresser.  "Don't know what you're talking about.  Anyway, who said anything about sleeping, baby?"  He tugged his tie loose and unbuttoned the top of his crisp white dress shirt.
     Joan winced.  "I wish you wouldn't call me that."
     George blinked at her.  "What, baby?  Why the hell not?"
     "I'm a grown woman, that's why.  You're not calling your wife 'baby,' are you?" 
     He rubbed at his forehead a moment.  "Why are we talking about my wife again?  What's with you today?"  He walked over to the glossy black phone on the bedside table.  "I'm going to get us some food.  You see a room service menu anywhere?"  He rummaged around in the top drawer and pulled it out triumphantly. 
     Joan tugged at her hair.  "I'm not really hungry, George." 
     He set the menu down and stared at her for a moment.  "Alright, what's going on, Joan?  Are you sick or something?  I can call down to the front desk, see if they got a bottle of Anacin or-"
     She shook her head.  "I'm not sick, George.  It's just that ... look, I don't think we should see each other anymore, is all."  She'd unwound a length of thread from the tablecloth with deft fingers and was playing with it idly. 
     "Hey, what?"  George crossed the room and sat down across the table from her.  He plucked her hand from the tablecloth and the thread and held it between his own.  "What are you talking about, Joan?  I thought everything's been great with us.  Jesus, if you weren't happy you shoulda said-"
     She ran her thumb across the empty space where his wedding ring usually sat.  "I've been happy.  I'm just afraid things will be different.  I-"
     "Hey, baby, come on, I - Christ, Joan, I forgot, sorry - things aren't gonna change, okay, I'm crazy about you and-"  He stopped.  "You didn't have anything to drink with dinner, did you?  Oh hell, Joan."  He squinted at her face.  "That's it, isn't it?  Well, that's nothing to worry about!  I'll take care of us, don't you worry.  I'll divorce my wife, I'll marry you, we'll have a family ..."
     She tugged her hand free of his and shook her head.  "I don't want all that, George.  I'm not keeping it." 
     He sputtered for a moment.  "Not keeping - Joan, it's our baby!  We could all be happy together, I'm telling you."
     "And what did you tell your wife?"  She sighed.  Her fingers were working the thread again.  "I don't want to be your wife, George, I like being the other girl better."
     They were silent across the table for a while.  A song filtered in from the room next door, and footsteps and laughing.  People were dancing.
     "You know, George, I think I'd like some room service after all.  Why don't you order us a bottle?"
     He looked at her silently, and got up and walked to the phone.