The Lucidity of Love: Memoirs of a Ghostwriter, Part Two

Excerpt from the second book in my so far two part memoir series:

Now that I’m settled, I must reflect on my past as a happy-go-lucky single. How can I forget the many times I’ve misled myself into a man’s loving arms, and how much I loved every minute of it?

Why, I squirm as if caught in a velvet trap…well, I could, but my second husband is standing right behind me and might ask me what I’m sitting on.

I loved my first husband, a wonderfully funny Jew whose parents had fled the Holocaust as kids. After a dozen roller-coaster relationships before my first real commitment, he was the only man I ever truly loved (Remerio, don’t look over my shoulder!)
Anyway, several years and sanity-defying relationships later, I landed in a seat in front of Him 2 in a Certified Nurse Aide class, next to a perking coffee pot.

My first husband thought he lucked out marrying his attendant. Gary was dying. I fell in love with his stubborn courage. He was the first person who ever needed me. After he died, I had a tragically brief affair. If I write about everything that happened, it’ll make an excellent trashy novel.

But Remerio stopped my new single life cold by kicking the back of my chair-HARD! He distracted me from talking to a middle-aged black lady, catching me in the middle of sniffling at her. I had a head cold.

I had been “taking it out” on Grace, who was overweight, casting her sidelong glances and sniffing loudly, while considering fetching her a cup of coffee. The pot was brewing close to me. It would’ve been hard for her to squeeze between the plastic seats. I began getting her coffee.

Sometimes I added creamer. I stirred it with the plastic stir sticks. She would ask me to add a sugar packet, please. But our relationship was rudely interrupted by the entrance of Remerio’s foot through the back of my plastic chair.

Turning around after the “kick-off,” I faced a flatly Filipino cold stare. The face, however, reminded me of a Middle-Eastern teacher I’d noticed at Ohio University, back in the 1970s.

I gulped, “So how’re you doing?” My Mom told me to be friendly to handsome strangers. And then Remerio smiled back. We got married, and near Christmas day three years later we were blessed by our Princess Angela, nut-brown as her Daddy and sporting my chipmunk cheekbones.

I guess I’d suggest more single ladies try sniffling at people to see whose attention they attract. If so, it helps if you fetch cups of coffee. It soothes people’s tired, ruffled feathers.

Be sure and add cream and sugar.

Let There Be Dragons

Science Fiction and Fantasy

America album cover

This rock band rescued me from the side of the road.

By Karen Cole

Word Count: 500 words

Well, once upon a time there were people, according to intellectuals. They said, “If there was not a God, we would be forced to invent one.” One day, two married souls, a man and a woman, got together but else-wise. I mean, they handily dropped all ineffectual pretenses, realized they were only animals, and followed a clarion call from Nature.

They entered a car that they owned, drove out to the desert, and stripped off all of their clothes. It was the Red Desert down in the American Southwest. They stuck their people butts up in the air, cracks in them, and began to run around in the desert like that. It took years, no decades, no centuries, no millennia…their passing generations grew smaller. Also, real people joined them. Many other “humans,” in fact, did.

After millions of years, they became small, insignificant lizards. Evolution is a process, and it can leap ahead through the centuries, and backwater until it turns into devolution, which is not Satan worship.

So anyway, it was a lot later, and they still had human brains. But they were different than ours, in an awful lot of ways. Also, the nuclear war that wiped out all of humanity transpired, without our “new” lizard folks. They just survived it, for no known reason, and the cacti around them kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So did the lizards. Natural selection began choosing out mostly the huge and more visible lizards to reproduce. You can see it coming.

In a few years, what looked like giant Tee Rexes but sporting the most mellifluous feathers, sparkling scales, gorgeous skin colors, beautiful attractive darks and lights, were stomping towards the former big cities. In order to comprehend their former selves better, they thought inwardly.

“Hey,” said Dinah, “How you doing, Horatio, what is shaking?”

“Earthquakes, we’re making them happen now. I am looking over the scenery, and it must be our honorable ancestors, the people. However, they are obviously dead from nuclear radiation.”

Another female got curious. She wasn’t as brainy as the others, so she strolled lightly over to one of the other buildings. So lovely that she was their Queen, she peered into an office window, gazing at everything inside in a loving way. Her courage was merely inquisitive.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, “There are still people in there, and they are doing…something. Why, they are groaning with their arms extended in front, moaning, rotting and looking…sorta like semi-naked corpses with lots of freckles!”

“Is it Mad at Mance?” crooned the King. “Another Zombie Apocalypse rudimentary dance?” He boldly stroked her errant backside. “C’mon, they know better now. Let’s take off for where we belong…you’re right. They’re what we used to be. Except some of us were far more worse looking. Well, it may be better than puking.”

And so they ate those former people, who were all grateful for the change.

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