In the middle of everything

This is a common scene in my home, most or many of those autumn days: me, pushing the dog bed against the wall, in spite of her strong preference for keeping the bed in the middle of the room, where I had to step over her repeatedly while I bake.

This dog does not want a den, she wants a stage. She’s been through many remodelings in a relatively short period of time, for a number of reasons. Sitting quietly in a corner does not guarantee love, attention or food, in her experience. When we upgraded our windows, single to double pane, she tripped the Pella man, whose ankle was twisted, but he forgave her anyway because of her strawberry blonde hair and her wish to play tennis ball with him before he leaves. The plumber is less forgiving, and charges me for his x-rays.

At some point in the remodel I am finally able to remove the vintage 70s Elvis posters that have been tormenting me through ex-husbands, sentimental children and unsightly holes in the wall that I have not ever gotten around to patching or painting.

Really, don’t we all know that remodeling is most manageable following a huge natural disaster? A flood, an earthquake, even a fire? Although fire is so absolute that it has almost a religious significance. This fire would not have happened without your sin. Or mine.

So I found myself dragged through our history: the beaded shell door hangings, the various sound systems, lost technologies, the aging spices from vegan experiments, the nasty industrial air fresheners of the nineties, the assorted snugglies and noise cancelling devices of the early 2^nd millenium. We washed our feet like Jesus at one phase in our nesting. We lit sage to cleanse in another. We accumulated in the next decade, more and more and more and more and more and came suddenly to a painful and choking halt, with duct tape and orange alerts and one ounce bottles to carry on our big adventures somewhere else.

Now it is time to upgrade the house with security systems and timers, cameras and automated gates. My gardeners begin to worry, begin to believe there are terrorists everywhere and now my baking is for reassurance. No worries, I tell them, Randy and Julian and John and Jorge, take this apple spice cake and this bag of little things we did not use in the remodeling. They are looking for re-usable wiring so they can protect the perimeter of their empty lots, where they will someday build the house they’ve always wanted for their wives and children, who are for the time being living in little thin-walled apartments in Rio Rancho, which are incredibly expensive and yet close. Being close is important. Being close is more important than double pane windows, which is something even my red-haired dog, who is no rocket scientist, knows, and I have come to agree with her, and leave her bed in the middle of everything, because that is where we all belong.

The Complete Idiot

I had this system for getting exactly what I wanted out of people.

It was so perfect, this system, like a surgical knife, or maybe more like a perfectly blown piece of glass.

This system worked for everyone, and I was the author of it. Sweet!

It is pretty exciting to be the author of a system for getting exactly what you want out of people.

I wrote a book: Getting What You Want Out Of People For Dummies.

And another: The Complete Idiot’s Guide For Getting What You Want Out Of People.

These books were wildly successful. I had some LLCs. Bunches of them. And two accountants to manage my numbers.

Lost seven jobs in 6 years. Fired for being hard to get along with.

Next I’ll write a book about Getting Fired for Dummies.

Pays the bills.

The sighting

Bubba likes the pit stop at the Possum Kingdom best. Nice lake there, keep the skeeters down by using industrial strength bug spray, enough to kill the catfish when they eat ‘em. Catfish is good eating. Best fried, but then what isn’t? Think about it: donuts, turkeys, corn dogs, ice cream. There aren’t many things that aren’t best fried. Bubba says the exception is fried pickles, but I like those fine, as long as I got something big and sweet to wash it down with. Only thing about fried food is you gotta have extra napkins or else old jeans, either or.

What changed Possum Kingdom the most, for the best, some folks think, was when the miracle happened. Face of Jesus on a green John Deere tractor seat. Big as life: that seat was muddy from Bubba sitting on it after wrestling with a couple hogs out by Clearwater, and the imprint of his holy hiney was a dead ringer for the risen savior. Bubba’s wife LouNesta spotted it and showed it to me first, I gotta tell you that, but don’t think I’m bragging or nothing, only God can take credit for a miracle. But I took the pictures and uploaded them onto my church’s Face Book page and next thing you know the donations are flooding in, for forty days and forty nights that money was running fast and green as young wine. Bubba’s sister, MayLou, was Dairy Queen that year and handed out over 400 chocolate dipped cones at the state fair, proceeds of which were given to the church, but that was nothing compared to the donations flooding those Paypal gates of heaven. I took another look at the tractor seat after it all hit the fan, but I feel like I should say truthfully I never did actually see Jesus there, just old Bubba’s buttcheeks and a smudge that people told me was the crown of thorns.

The accountant

I like specialty bubblegum flavors. Peppermint, of course, and sage, the rain flavors, mud, ocean, tomato worm, potato chip, and my current best ever favorite is dead roadkill flavor. I save all of the wrappers and when I have enough I fold them together in a custom built bubblegum chain that should reach from my bedroom here in Seattle to the outer city limits of Little Rock, Arkansas, if my calculations are correct.

My calculations are usually correct, and I do all of my parent’s accounting for their firm because they are not very good at calculations, which they say is not a nice thing to say but is true anyway. They point out to me that they have many skills that allow them to get me the things I need to achieve my goals, and that is true right now because of the child labor laws. The child labor laws were first instituted in this country in 1916 because many children, even children with very good accounting skills, were working in places that were too hot or too cold or dangerous and they worked so hard that many of them died before they could grow up to be accountants, which is what I am going to do. The job of parents is to support their children and give them the things they will need to be productive adults some day, and my parents are clearly doing this job, since I don’t have to work in a sweatshop and live in a sub-standard situation that would be hard to imagine these days anyway.

The accountant is the person in the company who makes sure that all the information about the money in the company is reconciled, with no missing information or information that is not true. This is an important job because missing or wrong information causes people and companies to make mistakes and then companies can fail, which can sometimes lead to children losing their homes, their computers, and their parents, whose job it is to raise the children until they are mature enough to take care of themselves. The other job of the accountant is to tell people when they’ve made a mistake and to hold them accountable for their mistakes. This would be a very good thing to do, although I’m not allowed to do this with my mom and dad, just make notes of the mistakes they’ve made so they can look later to see that I was right.

The accountant looks for predictable numbers in columns and rows and becomes highly sensitized to variations in the predictable columns and rows that suggest that an error, either accidental or intentional, has been made. This is important information to share with people who have an interest in the company, and this information should be made known as soon as possible so that mistakes can be corrected. This is the basic job of the accountant, and that is what I will be doing professionally by the time I am 16, which is when I should be done with my accelerated math program and ready to go to college. My parents say they don’t want me to go any earlier than 16 because of my social skills, which I don’t think matters, but I am still under age and so that is the end of that debate.

Wedding in Cliché, Missouri

“Gracious and good heavens,” said the minister, who was smiling like the cat who swallowed the canary. “You all just sit right on down here and tell me how this came about.”  He gestured at the two straight-backed chairs across from the desk where he’d been sitting, surfing the web, thinking about his sermon for this weekend: Curiosity killed the cat, and other reasons not to question God.

Hannah and her beau, Cliff, sat down carefully, awkwardly, looking down at the seats before they sat, as if they were afraid of whoopie cushions or snakes hiding under the thin cushions. Once seated, Cliff began to sweat profusely, fresh acne rising to the surface in apparent reaction to sitting discussing the pending nuptials. Hannah, fresh, pink and bland as a commercially grown apple, sqeezed his hand and said, “We are considering a couple of different places?” with a rising inflection at the end that said maybe this was a question but maybe it wasn’t.

Cliff’s not sure, but he thinks he might be dumb as a stump, way his daddy always said he was. All he’d been trying to do, see, was turn over a new leaf, and when he met Hannah, he said to himself, well, boy, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and next thing you know he’s sitting across from the Reverend Richard “Bull” Bullock, resident minister of the Turncoat Baptist Church in the tiny town of Cliché, Missouri. Cliff’s not been entirely honest with Hannah, who in her turn has not been entirely honest with him, and in this respect they are well suited to one another.  Better take my medicine like a man, Cliff says to himself, and tell her about parole and all that later on, if it comes up.

Hannah’s attendance at Turncoat Baptist is perhaps not as regular as she’s led Cliff to believe, and in fact up until six months or so ago, she’d been working out of her home, sending out political spam several hours a day, and she’d saved up enough for a nice Baptist identity, although she hadn’t quite gotten around to changing her name. Debbie, she thought, or Anne, something plain and protestant and ordinary, something that would fit right in Cliché. She’d made friends with the Reverend Bull just as soon as she moved into her little house in Cliché, early bird gets the worm, that’s what she told herself.

She squeezed Cliff’s hand again and smiled. “I love you,” she said to him, and looked down modestly at the engagement ring, then back up again at the minister.

“Reverend Bull,” she began. “We’ve just been talking? And we can’t decide between a religious ceremony and maybe going to Vegas instead? I told Cliff we should come talk to you?”

The Reverend Bull rubbed his hands together and began, “The love that holds a marriage together for an entire lifetime should be as big as the whole outdoors. This is a step not to be taken lightly. Have you talked to each other about what marriage really means?”

Cliff opened his mouth to answer, not knowing exactly what he was about to say. Before he could say anything, though, in fact, quite suddenly and without warning, a shot rang out.

15 minute freewrite: word associations; cliches.

Eulogy

He’s taken my money and killed himself. This is what I have to ask myself. I mean, I can imagine the earth opening up, gaping mouth and hungry for vengance and taking him down to the steaming pits of hell. I can definitely imagine that, and I can definitely more or less agree with that plan, what with all that greed and all that theft and all of those people, people like you and me, just left out in the cold, holding the bag, while he’s been sucked down into those bowels. But what I can’t understand is where the money went. Do they use money in hell? What currency? What exchange rate? Do they extend credit? Because what I don’t understand is why the man would kill himself after he got all the money. I can readily understand suicide for someone who’s too poor, too sick, too miserable, too pained to tolerate the hand they’ve been dealt, but when billionaires kill themselves, you’ve just got to ask a few questions. I mean, they wouldn’t be billionaires in the first place if they’d had any scruples, am I right? So how does it happen that scruples develop after they’ve taken everything but the very shirt off of my back and where the hell is my mother’s money? That’s all I want to know. Maybe he’s not really dead. Maybe he and Bill and Bernie and whoever else lives on their privately-owned island paradise somewhere, paying for their exile with her retirement funds. 

Then again, maybe he really is dead. He could be dead. So I ask again, where is the money? And then again, maybe he didn’t really kill himself. Maybe the machine killed him, the machine that makes the money happen, makes millionaires into billionaires (billion is the new million, had you heard?), then eats their heads.

Maybe he didn’t kill himself. Maybe his head exploded from trying to do the accounts, from trying to account for, be accountable for, the transfer of wealth from the gullible middle class into his own stainless steel glass and white leather penthouse apartment that he’s had replicated in several major cities worldwide so he never feels like he’s away from home. Because he’s pretty fearful of being away from home. Remember when he was little and he used to wet his bed until the psychiatrist recommended the electric matress pad that gave him a shock every time he did it? But not until he asked for them, because he was going away to summer camp and the summer he was seven, every kid in Potlatch Village knew he was a bed wetter and a thumb sucker too and they made his life a living hell. So much so that he told Dr. Stangard that he’d either have to use the electroshock system or give up on ever getting into a decent college. Dr. Stangard wrote a prescription for nerves and ordered the electric pad, which was delivered three weeks before camp started. It only took 4 days.

Then again, maybe he did kill himself. Maybe that early bedwetting was an indicator of deep sensitivity that he’d learned to suppress using electroshock and assorted prescription drugs and he was so out of touch with his feelings that he could screw anyone, even his own parents and sister, without feeling much of anything. And maybe when he went to rehab, like he did last December, they cleaned out his system and all those feelings came rushing back and overwhelmed him and he had feelings again for the first time since he was seven years old. Poor little guy. And maybe if he hadn’t turned on himself, he might’ve turn on us, like some of them did, mowing down an entire tribe of CEOs and investment bankers. And maybe we should be grateful that he didn’t. Bless his heart, we will miss him, won’t we?

Harry is not quite right

I suppose you could say, in a manner of speaking, that it all started with the tupperware parties. That was in our June Cleaver days, you know, you’re too young of course but I’m pretty sure you and Harry watched the reruns when you were little. Remember Harry at those tupperware parties – I think when they first started he was so little he could sit in the cake holder. I remember putting frosting on him one night, what a cute baby he was. Well, house and home was everything to everyone in those days. Sometimes I look back on it and think what in God’s name came over us all? It was like a collective insanity – you know, and then there was that backlash and everyone was taking LSD and singing and traveling around the country in bright orange camper vans. Those were cute; Harry got one in the 90s for nostalgia I suppose and fixed it up like he was going to a Brady Bunch reunion or something. Anyway, the tupperware. I got to saving just about everything in those tupperwares, and we have a basement with a wet bar, a game area and a lot of storage just in case of Armageddon, you know, all packed with water, canned goods, medicines, the kind of thing you might need just in case. I don’t like to be predicting doom all the time, you know, so I did grow tomatoes and keep up with things, kept the house up to date. I remember hanging a shower curtain in the 80s that was just covered with sea creatures: seahorses, clam shells, dolphins, starfish. Very pretty, as I recall. Things were complicated just then, what with the Cold War and the man with the shoe who kept pounding. I think his face was red, but our TV was black and white, so I may be misremembering. So I started collecting all sorts of things other than food and water and storing them in the shelves in the basement. Salt, aspirin, bandaids, socks. Things I could imagine us needing in case of nuclear disaster or a change in the divine plan. These were difficult times, and there were serial murders, and the president seemed to be having some kind of mental problem. So I started thinking a little more broadly. Like wondering what we might need if one of our own, or a neighbor down there with us, got a little disturbed. I picked up a few books on psychiatry and hid these in three inch deep rectangular tupperware behind the dryer, in case I needed to look up some kind of psychosis. The kids wanted some science projects, so we collected burrs and feathers, baking soda, vinegar, and safety pins. Then I thought arsenic might come in handy, a few knives for skinning small animals in case we needed them. I had a hard time remembering the name of that drug that smells like almonds, or was it like cordite? Eventually I bought a book on Poisons and Poisoning. It’s a big basement, generally speaking, but still I couldn’t help imagine being listened to, followed through the low halls under the stairwells that led to the semi-hidden rooms where the weapons were kept. Sometimes I heard their voices, you remember, Harry, don’t you? Sometimes I forget that Harry isn’t here now. Remember when he spoke in his own defense? I was so proud of him. He learned a lot in that library. Law, chemistry, psychology, the history of death. He started painting about three years ago. I haven’t seen him since I fell last year. Those stairs are pretty steep for a woman my age. But he still sends me cards once in awhile. You’ve been keeping the crawl spaces clean and clear of spiders and roaches, I know, and I do thank you for that. So does Harry. Shall we have a glass of wine now, or is it too soon, what do you think?

 

20 minutes, long list of collectively generated words. Silly, innit?

The five year plan

I once watched a calf being born. The sides of the mama cow distending, stretching like a rubber balloon. I saw the leg of the calf pushing, the knees bending. There was steam and the morning was cold. I was wearing a hat, I remember, and I put my gloves in my pocket because I could not reach and pull with the gloves tangling up my fingers. That was enough of birthing for me, although when I saw a goat birthing the next year, and then a number of children over the years after that, I did not have the same visceral response – the steaming breath, the labored grunting, the mud, the sensation that my arms would be torn out of their sockets. Everything else seemed like a Hallmark card by comparison.

Back when I first started writing copy, my hair went past my waist and all the way down to where I could sit on it. I wrote copy for condolences, for congratulations, for best wishes and for getting well again. I wrote my copy in a little room with a wooden desk, a Selectrics electric typewriter, and a window that opened. The building was old; there were pigeons on the ledge, and since the window opened, I kept it open and wrote copy for pigeons: thinking of you and your missing foot; congratulations on your new eave; best wishes to you and your hatchlings. Then there were the hawks and the condors hovering over the city, nesting in historic sites. Higher copy. That was when copy was cheap. There was an intern, a little baby intern getting work experience while in college, who made copies of copy that I was paid almost nothing to write. Then the intern would finish college and come in as a baby journalist, ready to know more about copy than me a scant six weeks after retiring their copy machine.

It’s possible to know too much about nothing and thereby to step into space, unaware of gravity, of gravitas, of the somber impact of doubt and failure. I was writing Hallmark copy, cheerful and vacuous, and looking out the window at the pigeons, and started a punk rock group, the Mangy Pigeons. We played head bang all night and wrote happy chappy greeting card copy all day. Paid by the line, the first year, then by the page when we could crank it out in bulk. Line after line. Me and three pale punk writers, great vocabularies, a bit too existential to acknowledge a plan. What do you want to be doing five years from now? Remember that team building activity? Let’s see, in five years I want to be attending the funeral of yet another pigeon, whether punk or feathered, and I want to be selling lines of copy to big corporations to print on pastel paper and be bought by ladies in tailored pant suits. Yes, there is a path like that, that may be followed. That may have been followed, although never expressed in a clear, concise, greeting card format:

Congratulations and best wishes on your aimless creativity.
Your parents must be proud.

Halloween Armadillo Returns – story below

Every Halloween, this story rises to the top of most popular posts on Cuentos, so today I’m front paging the first paragraph for those readers who may have missed it previously:

 

Armadillo to Zombie

I’ve made vegetarian soup for vampires before. The secret is, don’t tell them what’s in it.

 

A group of fingerling vampires came to my house this evening. I could hardly overlook them, although they were short. They fastened their tiny fangs to my shins and ankles and sucked vigorously, but even so I felt the blood puddling up in my shoes for as much as an hour after they took their handfuls of eyeballs and werewolf boogers and moved on to the next house – a recently remodeled mausoleum in the cemetery/crematorium across the street from Quarter’s Barbecue Emporium.  . . . . . . .

……. to read the rest, click here

Don’t look behind you….

Gordon

In a small fishing village on the coast of Baja California, there lived a young man. The young man’s name was Gordon, and he was a musician. He played the piccolo, the piano and the flute. He also played the harmonium, pipe organ, and the xylophone. He was incomparable on the guitar, the violin, and the cello. In fact, every instrument he touched he played as if he’d known it all his life.

 

Gordon was a talented young man. Coincidentally, he was also the most beautiful person who ever lived, with curly chestnut hair, eyes of sea green and skin the color of honey. Although he was a brilliant musician, when he played, the young women of his village hardly heard him at all. They were too busy staring at his honey-gold skin and dreaming of wrapping his chestnut hair around their fingers.

 

Gordon never noticed them at all, so intent was he on making and playing music. Gordon wanted to write a symphony composed of every instrument ever played since the beginning of all time. He collected exotic instruments – the didgeridoo, the kazoo, the shakade, the lute – and learned each one of them just as quick as that.

 

One day in the marketplace, an old woman in a faded blue caftan with a shawl on her head told him of an instrument that he did not yet have.

 

“It makes a sound,” she said, “somewhere between a whistle and a hum. With it you can render the sound of bees buzzing, and horses’ hooves, a baby crying, a pounding surf, the laughter of children, and then again the bees buzzing.”

 

“What is the name of this instrument?” asked Gordon, in quite a tizzy.

“I can’t tell you that,” said the old woman, and she winked at him a little wickedly or maybe a little crazily, it was hard to tell which.

 

“I will only tell you where you may find it. The rest is up to you.”  She leaned over and whispered into his ear. ”It is in Yakutz.”

 

Then she kissed him on his beautiful smooth lips, said “If only I was young . . .” and disappeared down an alley before he could say, “But where is Yakutz?”

 

Gordon decided then and there to go to Yakutz for this miraculous instrument that could the render the sound of bees buzzing, and horses’ hooves, a baby crying, a pounding surf, the laughter of children, and again the bees buzzing. He packed his bag (a striped Guatemalan bag that was deep and sturdy) and strapped it to his back.  As he left the town just at sunset, a wailing could be heard in the streets behind him as the women of the village realized that their handsome young man had left them without even as much as a glance from his gorgeous green eyes.

 

Young Gordon went to India and Peru and Paris and Beijing. He went to the Bahamas, Australia, the Yukon and the Sandwich Islands. Everywhere he went he asked “Where is Yakutz?” (which he could not find on any map anywhere). 

 

But everywhere he went the people he met were so stunned by his beauty that they would say anything to get him to stay with them. In Italy they called him “bellisimo.” In Guadalajara he was called “el guapo.”  In San Francisco they called him “honey,” and they called him all the time.

 

He worked his way around the world in a jiggery pattern (Gordon had a horrible sense of direction). Everywhere he stopped, he made his living playing exquisite music on exotic instruments. No one ever listened, though, because although he was a brilliant musician, his beauty eclipsed everything else. And everywhere he went, he asked every stranger about an instrument that could make the sound of bees buzzing, and then horses’ hooves, a baby crying, a pounding surf, the laughter of children, and then again the bees buzzing.

 

Gradually, Gordon became aware that he had a problem (he was beautiful and talented, but he was not quick). People were lying to him left and right, promising to take him to Yakutz (which more than once turned out to be a time share on one tropical beach or another) and then trying to seduce him instead. He became discouraged, and took himself to a small dude ranch in northern Utah, where he arranged to play the fiddle and teach clog dancing to pay for his room and board.

 

One evening he sat on a fencepost in an empty corral and played his fiddle with a sad heart. The corral was on a broad mesa with a view that went all the way to Wyoming (he assumed), and the moon was high and full. He heard coyotes howling not far away, and he thought they were crying with him. He wondered if the instrument he was seeking could make a sound like howling coyotes or belching frogs. He played even more sadly as he though of Yakutz.

 

Walking back along the moonlit trail to the dude ranch, young Gordon came upon an old woman walking slowly with a cane. She wore a babushka, and as he drew closer, Gordon saw that she was blind.

 

“You play the fiddle more brilliantly than anyone I’ve ever known,” said the old woman. “Except perhaps one, an old man I knew as a child who could play any musical instrument as if he’d done it all his life.”

 

Gordon thanked her, and they walked together in silence for a moment.

 

“You are a young man,” the old woman said at last. “What can possibly make you play so sadly?”

 

Gordon told her of his search for the one musical instrument he had yet to find, the one that could render the sound of bees buzzing, and horses’ hooves, a baby crying, a pounding surf, the laughter of children, and again the bees buzzing. He told her of his travels around the world, and of how sad he was that no one who saw his face would listen to him play or help him in his search.

 

The old woman listened without interrupting and then asked “Where did the old woman say you could find this wonderful instrument?”

 

Gordon told her, and the old woman said, in great excitement, “Why, I am from Yakutz! Let me take you there. What a fine time we will have!”

 

Gordon hesitated for a minute, thinking of past offers and hoping that the old woman’s Yakutz would not be another Club Med experience. Looking at her, though, he saw again that she was blind, and so they went to Yakutz together.

 

Yakutz is in Siberia, you know, and it is cold cold cold. The Yakuvitz keep warm with potatoes and vodka, with red-cheeked women and with music and dance.

 

How they danced in Yakutz! How they drank! Gordon was spun from dancer to dancer and his glass was filled again and again until he was as blind as the old woman, who sat in the corner with a potato in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other.

 

Late that night, Gordon lay on the floor with the room spinning wildly in a vodka dance around him. As the room settled and the Yakuvitz sank to the floor, where they slept, Gordon heard a sound. First he heard the sound of bees buzzing, and then horses’ hooves, a baby crying, a pounding surf, the laughter of children, and then at last again the bees buzzing, more faintly this time, as if they were buzzing away.

 

“What is that I hear?” said Gordon and he tried to get up on his knees, but he fell down again (because he was terribly drunk, to tell the truth).

 

“It is a Jew’s harp,” said a voice, and Gordon turned his head to see lying next to him a beautiful Russian girl, with red cheeks, flashing black eyes, big strong arms and the barest trace of a mustache on her upper lip. She smiled at him, and he stared back, entranced by the gap between her front teeth and the dimple on the left side of her face. She tried to sit up, but was just as drunk as he, and so they went to sleep, with their heads touching, on the floor underneath the table.

 

In the morning, the old woman introduced her granddaughter to Gordon, and was very pleased that they’d gotten to know each other on the floor underneath the table the night before. Her name was Valenka, and she hugged him with both her strong arms and gave him the Jew’s harp from a pocket under her apron.

 

Gordon put the Jew’s harp in his mouth and played. The cold morning air was filled with the sound of bees buzzing and horses’ hooves, and Gordon took the harp from his mouth and smiled bigger than he’d ever smiled before. Valenka smiled back, and Gordon realized that she was smiling at him and his Jew’s harp and his music, not at his most beautiful face, and he felt himself blush all the way to his toes.

 

That evening at sunset they were married. They played many an exotic instrument at the wedding feast and danced ’til the sun came up the next day. Afterwards they left Yakutz and traveled to Kyoto, where they’d heard a Zen master made a Jew’s harp of bamboo, and that with it one could make a sound like the beating of hummingbird wings. They didn’t know the name of the Zen master, but they were sure they could find him, if only they looked long enough.

 

©1995 Teresa Phillips. May not be used without permission.