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...
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...
Oh, Prose! How you’ve thrown me for a loop? And all these years I have thought that the bottles were there to drown the past in, not to float up it’s relics. But the damned memories will never die, will they? And now you want to see me drunk on them, and to watch as I regurgitate them up, and laugh as I wallow in the messes I’ve made. But there is this one bottle, dusty and aged. Watch as it clings like oil to the sides of this swirling crystal. See how it settles on the bottom, weighty and sure? Lift it up. Don’t fall shy, now. Push your nose right in. Close your eyes, and mouth. Breath it in like a young girl’s breath, floral and light. Yes, that is good! Relax. Let it have it’s way. It will not hurt. Not much. Now then, slowly… taste. Do not swallow, not yet. Swish it instead. Swish it hard! Harder than that, Prose! Come now! You asked for this. Swish it all around! It is on you to wake the flavors up! There is no shame. Ok, good… now… now… now then. Swallow. Feel it down. Fee...
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