Category: March Stories

Moving Mountains

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Kat hadn’t thought about the ant tattoo in years. Small and hidden, she’d forgotten about it until Grant found it accidentally. He renewed her interest, stroking it when massaging her shoulders, licking it during sex.

She’d gotten the tattoo at a beach town on a drunken dare. Now she wished she hadn’t. A reminder that love has unexpected consequences. That even family can’t be trusted. For Kat, the tat symbolized both escape and surrender. She considered removing it.

Knowing it’s the scars inside that matter, she didn’t. Repairing the surface is just the beginning of a journey to the self.

Maya

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Maya had escaped death more than once. Fired from a cannon during her act with the circus, she had been mesmerized by shallow praise from the man who lit the fuse and held her cape. In the moments before ejection, her life flashed in front of her eyes.

More and more memories from her childhood emerged. It hadn’t been good. The slender thread of connection with the other performers broke. Seeking relief from her moody reverie, she fell in with a troop of acrobats who lived together in communal harmony and mindfulness. Cautiously, she explored her past. Joyfully, she recovered.

Self-Enlightened

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Angie wanted to act in Hollywood. She moved to LA, took a job at a cafe, and waited to be discovered.

Yoga strengthened her, put her in touch with her chakras. She realized that acting had brought her a shallow kind of security. Now she wanted more. At least enough to pay the rent.

Meditating her way into a sales career, she found that she was good at persuading people to buy what they wanted, whether they needed it or not. Convincing herself that the path to enlightenment had led her to this point, amassing things became her life goal.

Women Will Lead

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Put women in charge. That’s the antidote to snake-oil salesmen working in a post-truth environment to steal your democracy. Endorsed by the New York Times: Elizabeth Warren has a plan and Amy Klobuchar can work. Restore dignity and fairness to civic life. There’s hope.

Pay no attention to juvenile slogans. Forget social media. Turn the television to another station or take a news break. Read escapist fiction. Whatever else, ignore the sad little man tweeting behind his Wall. Meditate on the image of him leaving office by military helicopter saying, “I can’t come back. I don’t know how it works.”

A Child Shall Lead

In 2020, as foretold in the Bible, the lion lay down with the lamb. Potentially bringing peace to the United States, Congress gave the vote to citizens 16 years and older. The bill also permits presidential candidates as young as 21. Taken together, these measures promise change in a country that has been divided for too long.

In other news, under indictment for fulfilling a campaign promise to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, President Trump will not seek re-election.

Citing the biblical injunction that, “a child shall lead them,” the remaining adult in the room, Mike Pence, won’t run either.

Four Years Later

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If you laid a transparency of then across now, there’d be no difference. The oak tree was infinitesimally taller. Knee high corn still grew in the muddy fields. The white house, with green slatted shutters, slept on a rise beside an identical lilac. Yellow pig stench choked the air. Even the girl smoking a ciggie with him was the same. College had not really happened. The demonstrations, and the wild blue moons, and the nights up until dawn accumulating debt. None of that was true. The shutters, the tree, the girl, the ciggie. Those were the facts. The other was fiction.