Excerpt: In a narrow boutique (wandering rocks).

Another excerpt, although perhaps you wouldn't think so.  Its origins are from a dream of a few weeks ago, but I wrote it today.

Copyright © 2011 Bob R Bogle

Bravery, or folly?  Friends in high places.  Straight-spined Jason sailed between the clashing rocks, Hera's unwavering eye on high watching him.  Hera's protection.  Right into the teeth of the Planctae.  Sprays of plankton-seething streamers of foamy sea ribbons, surging jets spurting heavenward among gnashing, grinding chondritic molars.  Release a dove into India inky storms raging on a rolling, churning dead man's sea.  Thanks a lot, the emancipated fowl of fate must have mused, eying her liberator coldly.  But he was more Odysseus than Jason, he thought, having no benefactors or well-wishers.  He worked alone.  Day after day, solitary, brow furrowed, taking up dividers and compass and charts, he sought to contrive intricate windings beneath the beetling rocks down dangerous alleyways and dark avenues toward another chance rendezvous, and he had only argyle socks for luck.  They looked foolish, but they remained hidden under the cuffs of his slacks.  Mostly hidden.

Maps filled his mind.  For the negotiation of time and space.  A thin needle slipping through fabric, or Newtonian, sailing strange seas of thought alone.  What faithful companions had he?  No heroes, only the ghosts of the accursed and condemned.  Tantalus.  Sisyphus.  Orion.  How far can the rules bend before they snap?  Seeking out random passages through a Brownian sea of strangers and ragged people.  Faces.  Prefer always morphing, interchangeable unknown gray-brown souls to friend or foe.  Intersection video mounted high on traffic light poles to freeze frame speeders red light runners and license plates.  Flatten four dimensions to two with an admissible timestamp.  To butter you like a butterfly pinned on a toasty time slice.  Spies everywhere, their bowties are cameras.  Melt into anonymity.  Draw no attention to one's self.  Now chose:  light or shadow?  Either Orwell.  Paranoia's encircling coils.  Long suburban runs and short series of arcs in poorer quarters and backtrack past the horseless racetrack where fish skeletons school in the Rialto and dart past Grant Glenn Fort Lowell, culminating for a too brief flickering moment between bookstore stacks or a glimpse from the floor level to an upper walkway in an acid bright-lit shopping mall or, just once, for two hours in the back of a cool, darkened movie theater.  Unrepeatable.  Eschew pattern.  Wander.  Stagger.  Suggestive of half-aware stragglers, but secretly sharks prowling cold waters, or police cruisers gliding through crouching, dubious fire-blackened neighborhoods.

In a narrow boutique too crammed with knickknacks and cheap novelty bric-a-brac, in a dim corner near a wheel of tie-dye scarves he stood like one of many warm-bodied tourists in the early evening dusk who had accidentally stumbled in.  Watching from the corners of his eyes.  But he only observed by degrees, teasing himself, where she was at another wheel, feet slightly apart and at an angle, unseeing him, knowing she was early.  She stood so she could see both the counter and the door.  Long strings of necklace beads were before her.  She looked down at them and was running her fingers among their abundant cascades, flowing like falling water.  Putting her hand in, moving it sideways, retracting it, the beads played along her palm, rattling down.  They were very long necklaces, a hundred of them identical, cheap, with small, round, iridescent beads, dark purple with shimmers of green and microbursts of turquoise when they caught the light a certain way.  Flashing hummingbird beads.  He was watching her, yes, her eyes downcast, but with a faint smile on her mouth.  Anticipation?  Yes, and anxiety.  Eager and jumpy.  That excitement.  The kohl-eyed girl behind the counter said something to her.  No, just looking.  That one smiled dishonestly, nodded, turned to another customer.  Was it safe?  It was safe.  He let slip the silk scarf he'd been stroking at unawares and stepped forward silently just as she was wandering around the necklace rack, turning her back to his approach, her hand still pulling lightly through the parallel columns of beads, her eyes watching the light dance on the tidal wave ripple she was making.  When his hand touched the small of her back and he said her name into her ear she started suddenly, her hand jerking back.  It snapped one of the necklaces, and hundreds of small, iridescent purple and chartreuse beads were instantly popping and bouncing across the wooden floor.  Everyone in the shop turned to look directly at the two of them.

"I'm sorry.  I'm sorry!" she said.

The severe-featured girl at the counter, eighteen or nineteen, gave her a sharp look.  "Never mind," she said, all scorn and hauteur.

He, laughing, paid for the damage.  Just a few bucks.  "Sorry for the mess."  They left together, and moments later they were apart.  Again.