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Three Stories

It was a dismally beautiful afternoon. In fact, it was so beautiful that Samantha wondered if it would ever end. The trees were so green, the light green that only early spring can offer.

Eat Your Heart Out

My friend, Arnold, is having a fight with the stewardess. “I will make you into salami!” he is screaming. I’m making believe I don’t know Arnold. I bury my face in a magazine, “Modern Maturity,” a few seats back from his. We are flying Astral Coach to Venus.

Little Soapy And Big Jim

We’re sailin up the Limpopo River from Fool’s Tide to Pope’s Eye. In some places we can reach out and touch the dried old balls of priests hanging from the trees way out over the river.

The Wanderer

I was walking with a friend a few nights ago, sharing tales of lusty, high adventure drawn from a mid-winter’s odyssey to Boston, when Joe offered a remarkable insight: “You know, it’s the settled man who keeps the wanderer on the road.”

A Short History Of Part Of North Carolina

With Some Names Changed To Protect The Innocent, The Guilty, & The Dead

They had locked chains around Lester’s skinny ankles. The faded blue prison shirt and pants fitted poorly on Lester’s five-eight body, all of a hundred pounds. “Lester won’t come out,” Bambi said. She was right. Lester hanged himself in his cell within the year.

Off The Road

Studying astronomy, as a child, I was fascinated by the Earth’s movement, its rotation on its axis, its orbit around the sun, its sweep, with the rest of the galaxy, through space. Despite the evidence of my senses, nothing stood still. 

Lou, Turn Up Your Hearing Aid

Birth and death is a continual cycle. Like corn, you have a season. You grow, flower, give seed, fade away. But the energy within you keeps going — like the energy of corn. Have you ever been in a corn field and felt that energy?

When A Home Is Not A House, Or, News From Swamis Local 486

I was born and brought up in a cave. This was in a former life, of course. I remember to this day lying there in a dent in our kitchen wall, only hours after I was born, watching my dad throw stones at the wolves outside.

Spinach Wilts

It was The New Age and there I was on the elevator — 68th floor, 15th floor, 43rd floor — thinking: bongs will never totally replace joints. Bongs have their place, sure, a big place. But a joint is a . . .

Most Of All, I Remember Steeplechase

First he insults me, tells me I’m not a human being. Well, I tell him — this frog, this polka-dotted frog — that I just can’t control myself in the face of spaghetti.