Mr. Chuck Stonehill walked over from next door and told me he found a tackle-box, a bullet, and a rubber by the picnic table in the backyard under the palm tree between our rusting beach trailers.
I was so innocent that my first thought was he didn’t know he was exposed. But the way he was staring at me so fixedly soon made me realize it was on purpose.
The streets of Memphis’ town had been orange groves when he was a boy. He remembered as, one by one, the groves were bulldozed to make room for neighborhoods, for the people from up north, finally tired of the long winters, to settle into their respiratory diseases and neurological disorders.
The ending to my story in Orlando flickers. I thought I knew how the story would end when I first set out to write this series. The scene would be framed at the Orlando International Airport...
If I like her and she likes me, we run the gauntlet: Wally’s, Lil Indies, Tako Cheena, and then a fifty percent chance of never seeing each other again...
At Lil Indies, a hipster bar, it doesn’t seem like many people are getting into the music. People pause conversation and look at the empty dance floor like someone left on the TV. So I decide to get wasted out of my mind until I believe in myself...
I’m too lazy to walk the 1.5 miles to Publix, so I hail a Lyft and sit on the apartment complex stairs with my chin in my palm, thinking about a Buddhist koan...
In Orlando, friends have streamed in and out of my life. Musicians, writers, sculptors, martial artists, undergrads, everyday people with big dreams of traveling the world. People who give me rides.
It’s peak season and all the snowbirds are here, trying to escape the horror of the outside, for the last few weeks the smell of decayed ocean life has fallen like a curtain of death.
