Archive Monthly Archives: September 2020

“Crystal Geneville”

“Crystal floated into Henry Hall in modestly flared, bell-bottom jeans and a Moroccan-style, gauze-cotton blouse whose pliant material had not been prevented by the intervention of a frustrating brassiere from outlining the baked apples of her breasts, from the yielding tops of which emerged a walnut and a raisin on each side. She wore boots […]

Continue reading

“Colorado”

“In the first case every element played subtly against every other: the dark-jade green of the red-maple leaves, lighter in tone than the water’s color, grew progressively more so as the sun touched its upper branches. The gray-green undersides of the leaves matched the deeper gray of the stream rocks and the silver-gray of the […]

Continue reading

“That Afternoon”

“In the spirit of the colloquy on Oneness and duality they had all engaged in, Skylar now reflected on what ideas from that interchange he might apply to the day itself. He saw immediately that it would be counter-productive to put it on a shelf of honor and hope for other future days that might […]

Continue reading

“Cambridge Avenue”

“But if there was a street that loudly trumpeted one’s arrival in royal lands, that passed the gates leading into the aristocratic residences, to the locus of wealth and prestige, where a silent decree required that one leave behind any semblance of, or association with, middle-class life before entering the precinct, it was Cambridge Avenue. […]

Continue reading

“The Sky”

“Above me the sun had been cloud-hidden, like a theatrical star in front of whom feathery fans were held so that she should not be prematurely seen. But there was wind on high and the humble, broken cumulus now began to move, stretching out of compaction into distinctiveness. The sun was no longer a faint, […]

Continue reading

“Bona Dea”

“Lending credence to the theory that one assumes different genders in various lives, my artist-self once caught, in reverie, the barest glimpse of a figure I ought, as a man, never to have seen. Quite possibly it was a buried memory from a life I had spent as a female, come to this one, in […]

Continue reading

“The Beats”:

“The legacy of the Beats still hung heavy over North Beach. Decades had passed, but their presence, in such a compact locale, had been so strong that it still hovered over the place. I saw Kerouac’s image on a wall in a café and read inscriptions detailing what poetry reading had happened here on what […]

Continue reading

“The Sun”

“The sun, scintillant cue ball in the sky, luminous Eucharistic wafer, eyeball of God, was now setting over the Pacific. On the top surfaces of the rock outcroppings, pools of water left over from light rains and surging waves resembled jigsaw puzzle pieces waiting to be assembled into some grand design. The sun shot a […]

Continue reading

“Elsa’s Fairies”

“Elsa encountered the elementals of both earth and water; she met them in gardens and woods, by streams and lakes. Something told her that these beings intermediated between the gross physicality of the world experienced through the senses and the subtle spirituality of the celestial domains. She apperceived that just as the fleshy integument of […]

Continue reading

“The Flowers”

“When they arrived, she stood to the fore extending a handful of flowers. “Oh, aren’t they absolutely beautiful?” Windy asked, as only she could, a question that had been put a million times before in a million similar situations, but never with such genuinely honest questioning, with a real desire to know if the others […]

Continue reading