Even though we live in a city, Lee’s warmth makes it feel like a village somehow. In a village, there would be less of a class divide. Lee might be the checkout clerk, but we would see each other in the square, maybe at the pub. I would buy her and her husband a drink.

The Pirate removed his hat and nodded at the back of Grace’s head.
“M’lady.”
He placed the hat on an empty stool.  Grace looked up.
“Dark enough tonight,” The Pirate said, “…to have your legs stolen out from under you.  Far too many miles, but I was determined to make it.  Never disappoint ghosts.  What have you done to the Lepidoptera?  They’re positively out of their skulls.  Do they have skulls?”

“The Mud Club. It’s right around here somewhere.” Our foreign comms units weren’t granted access to Texas communications. We knew our Central States’ units would be blocked before we left and had planned to buy a convertor chip but hadn’t had a chance yet. Remembering that the tourist bars were on 6^th Street, we counted our way up there. We passed dark dance halls, closed virtual world entertainment cafés, and what must have been seven barbecue joints promising exotic synthetic meats from places like Brazil (tapir), Malaysia (sun bear), and the deadly snakes of Australia.

Looking back, I could have avoided a whole lot of trouble if I had just handled things with Tamsin in an adult fashion. Perhaps had a chat with her over a joint behind the Farm King. Tell her I was a married woman and couldn’t carry on like that.
I’m kidding myself. Nothing would have helped. Certainly not talking about it.

He stood up and opened his leather bag. He took out a small, gold-colored instrument. It was a tuning hammer. He opened the top of the piano. With a small grunt he lowered his arm into the piano back. I could hear the faint tinging of strings as his hand moved around in the piano’s depths.

I was lying in the bathtub one night thinking about Simon (Bren, don’t be mad, I only liked him because you were gone and because I was so lonely), and I lay there picturing him and Corrine together until the water went lukewarm. When I wiped the steam from the mirror, I looked the same as I always had but inside I was completely numb. Every which way my mind went was bad—Simon, Ziggy, you.

Jenny steered the car out of the vast Walmart lot to head west out of Moberly on Highway 24. Since starting the job as a cashier six months ago, she drove back and forth this way four days every week. The pay was low, only twelve dollars per hour, but there was the health-care benefit. Child support from Karl was hit or miss.

Amy fell in love with soldier Blackie Boyette because there was a war on, and her daddy was gone to the front. “Your papa’s off to the seven seas,” jived the Andrews Sisters on every jukebox in town. Amy never had enough time with him, her big, strong daddy, Captain Tom Archer from the Kentucky mountains, so fiercely devoted to the U.S. of A.

The doctor, who had been perched on the edge of his seat, now sat back.  “Well, with humans, it can take weeks, months, sometimes even years before they start telling the truth.”

     “They lie to you?”

     “To themselves.”

He looked up from zippin his fly an I guess he could see I weren’t convinced, ’cause then he said, “I wouldn’t want you followin in my footsteps in most things—card sharpin can be mighty dangerous an drink can ruin a man ’bout as quick as anythin—but I hope you’ll heed what I say about how to treat women—whether we’re talkin ’bout one woman or a hundred, ’bout one night or fifty years.  Now you just set there a minute an hear me out.”