“All these impressions struck Skylar at once. Just the sight of the girls playing volleyball on the beach conveyed the totality of this understanding to him. And no playwright could have scripted this first glimpse of California better than fate had. To drive in at night—the darkness assuring that even the two boys still awake […]
Continue reading“In the flats, the water was uniformly shallow and the foam residue of the waves extended for hundreds of yards, like suds in the bottom of a huge drained bath tub. Lanes formed behind the waves in this area, straight long-line streamers stretching out behind them as they broke towards shore. Auburn kelp fronds, swept […]
Continue reading“Renaissance serenaded me in that stuffy attic. I stood by myself, with feet on the ground and soul flitting up and away. The song carried me to another age and to a finer way of approaching the world. It showed me crystalline life, life glinting and translucent, life fashioned by artistic hands. The music danced […]
Continue reading“He would have instantaneous rapport with her. Both would look and both would see; each would touch in synchrony. Like twins they would know one another’s thoughts without the exchange of words. All four eyes would drink in the petaled emanations of moonlight from the gleaming disk overhead. Both hearts would swell, joy-filled, at the […]
Continue reading“Here, on the island, the peacocks roamed in all their weird glory. The creatures appeared to contain three entirely dissimilar bodies in one: an electric-blue neck, so stunningly bright as to be almost overpowering, a brown-gray-and-white back that looked like brain tissue or fish scales, and a tail that might have been a nest woven […]
Continue reading“Skylar’s saunter to school took, then, an ever-so-slightly-indulgent path on which stones came to magical life, fallen leaves wheezed goodbye to the world, and gutter water sluiced in turbulent runnels. These observations of animate nature were interspersed with time-transcendent, frozen moments in which he experienced a tangible sense of stoppage, of everything: of people, pebbles, […]
Continue reading“But naturally no one, not even the families who benefited from them, liked to discuss these hidden aids (that put the odds of the game always in favor of the elites). After all, they dimmed the mystique surrounding the “self-made man,” seeming to indicate, as they did, that he took unfair advantage of those not […]
Continue reading“After the waves spent themselves against the sand, the lazy whitewater spume formed crescent shapes, which overlapped like paint blobs on an artist’s palette, some superjacent, some underneath. As I lost my sense of a separate self, a physical form with a so-called mind contained in that shape, my soul flowed out, spreading, deliquescing, and […]
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