Kindle Edition
Amazon
rfrenchnovelist
booklaunch
Category:
Literary Fiction
Publisher: Richard French
ISBN-10: 1539534383
Type: Fiction
Pages: 82
Copyright: Nov 19, 2013
ISBN-13: 9781539534389
Price: $2.99 (eBook)
21 brief prose sketches about people in a large urban park dealing with issues in romantic relationships.
Various fictional characters work out the complexities of romance. Each relationship is unique: refugees, artists, youngsters, middle-aged folks and older, business people. Some relationships are rocky, some are in holding patterns, others look as if they will thrive. What do the characters in these vignettes do well or poorly?
Excerpt
Forlorn
Charlie went to the park again, doubting that it would work for him this time. “She’s sleeping with another man.” He didn’t know what to do with his angry soul, sick from arguments and silences.
He figured there was more hatred in their two supposedly civilized hearts than in a cell in the city jail. Turmoil in one heart anyway, for sure. He couldn’t say about her but he was willing to guess.
A swirl of electric feeling scattered into a thousand burning comet tails.
Dogs barked. A car with a noisy muffler hurtled by. A seagull squawked to its fellows, “Grumpy man! Bitter man!” A warning that nothing worked the way it should.
He tramped as far as the zoo. A peacock called four times with a sound like a squeaking door. The peahens, staying in their wire cages, didn’t show much interest. Noise devoid of feeling, especially when you’ve heard it several times a day all your life, has no special appeal, though its familiarity can seem like protection.
The peacock found another male to stand beside. Charlie wondered why they didn’t chat with each other. Still another male backed halfway out of his hutch, opened his train to display an assortment of green, blue, and yellow eyespots. His neck with orange feathers underneath moved rhythmically. A companionable, gray-brown, pointy-eared, silent-as-a-stone wallaby ignored his neighbor’s tired, regal splendor.
Only a few visitors came to the zoo on that quiet evening. When no one was looking, Charlie climbed over the fence. He squatted next to the peacock and cawed along with him. He hadn’t been a model of fidelity either.
Nothing was right. He tried to send away his misery in a wail of caws. When he was done, he felt worn out as a long-distance swimmer.
Marilyn would think him an idiot if she knew. She would be right. The fact that he is an idiot for her won’t change her thinking.
|
