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6. Coming (Back) To America  I.  He'd had this wildly exotic notion trapped in his mind that he could ride the whole way from Florida to Michigan, layovers in train terminals included, simply observing what took place beyond his passenger window and in the aisle/s of the train/s, monitoring, controlling his inhalations and holding the air in his lungs and that he could mentally recite and rehearse the contents of a particular scientific article he'd discovered in one of the virtually innumerable magazines donated to the Pelican Ranch. He'd adored that article. To a high school runaway, it spoke volumes about the nature of education and the individual. It said the even a pea-brain like McEntyre just needed a semi-reasonable, semi-supportive environment to grow into some definition of a functioning adult.  The boat-ride from South Qubar Island was a cinch. There were only a few other soon-to-be former inmates being transferred back to the continental United States and there...

4. Parents & Pursuit  He leaned back in his ergonomic deskchair, limply holding his cigarette with the smoke cascading upwards into the indifferent atmosphere. Suicidal animosity pulsed in the obesity of his thoughts. Jeff Gerstein, by his own estimation, had come to the end of his proverbial rope. He'd made his living/livelihood as a housepainter and homecare professional for the past 20 years -- having begun as an apprentice in his early-twenties and working for a man almost old enough to be his father...and eventually moving out of state when the opportunity to work for an entire year on a single project concerning various buildings on one property was offered to him in Michigan. His thoughts oscillated between the cigarette and the stove in the cottage and these fleeting impressions of the past. They came unbidden and only rarely welcome. They haunted his self-worth, his notion of stoicism, his ego. He needed to make money. Whether he lived in New York or Michigan or the wi...

1. The Death of Nathan Rueben (Vulnerability)  They moved into the state of Michigan in pairs, in groups of three or larger or significantly larger (less than 5% total of their estimated number arriving by themselves) from the earliest hours of the day of the event, arriving in personal transportation as varied as 2021 Forde Cavaliers and Polaris Sonatas to 1999 Harkomhans and similarly antiquated vehicles and more than a few (less than a thousand) bicycles, motorcycles and choppers traversing the border with busses and with trains from places as far-removed as Utah and Arizona and as local as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, arriving with such staggering consistency as to suggest Rueben's funeral not only contained a psychological weight for each of them in their hearts, in their souls, but that every man, woman and child to the last were implanted with some indominable, irresistible magnet that demanded without exception for their presence and regardless of political or philosophical ...

5. A Telephone Call from Outside Waffle, New York  You could almost see the muted television playing Judge Trudy or some late-morning talkshow or any of the several dozen shallowly-written soap operas of the day going like an animated road sign in Gertrude Winchester's living room. Her glazed eye/pupils and her draping jaw/lips and her dementia-swallowed heart. Grandma Winchester fiercely independent but ultimately sedentary and lethargic. She didn't receive many calls or visitors. Having been married without interruption since her late-twenties and then in her 80s when the American Techno-Industrial Empire had seemingly reached its violent and hubris-infected peak, it was unlikely she was going to alter anything about herself in her twilight years. The phone rang. It was Dorothea McEntyre. He daughter and only child. Dorothea was always contending with one frivolous or another. "Mom?"  "She's the one who pays the rent on this dump." Actually, the U.S Go...

3. The Convicted Rapist & the Shape of Sounds  I.  Helena Slivovitz, as the story most often goes, had very neat, precise-looking handwriting. The address of Spook McEntyre, c/o the Pelican Ranch, South Island of Qubar, had an effect not unlike the presence of exotic lobster tails and specialized bovine entrees being served in a city-school cafeteria. He sometimes felt, as the story most often goes, an uncomfortable mixture of hesitant lust and empowering rage towards the calm so obvious and almost arrogant sitting there in his name and in hers when he received the letter-filled envelopes. As the story most often goes, he received these letters every three or four weeks during the first 18 months of his imprisonment.  They were, depending on his erratic moods, either an appreciated disruption of the anomic, tediousness and sheer agony of day-to-day life with others undergoing various types of behavior counseling and recovery counseling and maturity counseling, or ...

2. Something/Disfigured; Living Arrangements  Something disfigured and barely tangible. Something hard, tight, stubborn to soap & sponge and the viciously determined fingers of Dorothea McEntyre. She scrubbed at it like some animal fighting a blood infection. This tiny thing, roughly two inches by two inches. Amorphous and yet memorable. It made her heart race like a prisoner of war trapped in a bamboo cage.  And she made an enemy of that something. She refigured the strings of its identity to be more than just mildew or filth. It almost had a face, something waiting to be named and conquered by her efforts... Of course, she was ridiculed by these efforts. They created a chorus of tiny insect voices that rose in their chatter of spectral taunting, seemingly more pronounced with every scrub of her hand and the instrument...  She considered the Priest. Her last confession hadn't gone so well. When she thought on them, none of her confessions were redemptive or fruitful ...

UPDATE 10/8/2024  I thought about this again this morning. Jason said that what he had on his computer when the police accused him of possessing child pornography was that he, Jason, put it there so that he would never look at it and if he did it was set up in such a fashion that it would be erased upon opening.  QUESTION: Is that possible? If you can hack computers and you read this, please drop line @ richardand441@gmail.com. I'll read everything with suspicion. Answers are nice.   He looked like some junior representative of the League of Loving Satanists: his feathery, long hair pulled back in a ponytail from his wispy goatee and that fragile, white face.  He dressed in gothic and cartoonish slacks and graphic t-shirts or casual shirts depending on the day.  And, brought together by homeless circumstances, we knew each other more than a week or two before I finally realized the accusations of owning child pornography and being on probation for it were t...