I watched it all from my spot on the bench beneath the cedar-pole awning of la Hacienda Gustamos over the course of one solitary month. During those thirty days, for lack of anything better to do, I whittled their likenesses from chunks of manzanita wood as I watched them work; the super-hard, desert-dried ironwood forcing me to make frequent pauses for blade resharpening, but by the time their construction project was completed so was mine, as I had carved out rather lifelike 3D figures of them all… boy, girl, and burro. The pair rode double into Ciudad Juarez with the boy behind, their bouncing synchronized astride the swayed back of an overloaded, yet quick-stepping burro, the burro‘s pace appearing suited to the pair’s dispositions. A bulging towsack tied to it’s rump increased the burro’s already considerable load. The day was warm in Ciudad Juarez, as always, the sky clear, as usual. The burro came to an abrupt standstill on the banks of the city’s thinly flowing river, whe...
Blackhearts (mostly fictional recollections from long ago told with some undeniable truths) I believe it was the summer of '78, or possibly '79. Please humor my looseness around such details, as I think we can all agree that either one of those summers would have been a long, long time ago. Anyways, when I pulled in from work that day there was a girl sitting on the curb in front of my building; a melancholy looking girl with her chin cupped in her palms, her elbows propped up on her closed knees, and her toes pointed disjointedly inwards. I’d seen the girl a couple of times in the past week or so, coming or going from the apartment across the hall from mine, an apartment where at least three rowdy young guys lived along with their mean-assed Pit Bull dog, although truthfully it was hard to say exactly how many lived there, as there were generally a slew of kids hanging around that apartment, to recently include this girl who was currently perched on the curb right where I li...
A Mile in Flip's Shoes It had always seemed to Flip that they were made to be together, but she was almost ready to beat-feet out. Two summers isn’t so long, but when every minute of every day is spent together, it can seem like a lifetime. He was smothering her, but what could she do? She could hardly leave. She had panic attacks thinking about life without him... she hated to imagine what would happen to her if he were to walk into the ocean and just disappear? It was not out of the question. That very thing had happened to one of her friends just last year. Something inside her warned her that she would be useless without him... a sole with no purpose. She would be lying, though, if she said she wasn’t worn out with their relationship. It had gotten to where she couldn’t even finish a thought withou...
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