Harvest Moon

Why do things that seem so far away, sometimes look so near?

A few minutes ago, Buck had been a figure who occupied a space "light years" in her past, now he was here, right here, in front of her--well lying on the ground in front of her, after she'd punched him, again and again.

What's gotten into me?

Lola's noisy thoughts turned to recollections of the golden harvest moon.

It can seem so large and looming, as it perches above the San Gabriel mountains on the late October horizon. No matter how close it looks, she reminded herself, it's merely an optical illusion.

Lola's Beautiful Day

She begins to make a list—not the kind of list you scribble down and take the supermarket—but a mental list of impossible things that are nearly possible: laughing fish, blue lemons, birthday cakes with dynamite candles, her skeleton, fresh out of bones, the man she almost married, a dark hole aimed at a bullet.

My thoughts are radio waves, with geometric messages, no one, but I, can hear. Whatever I do, I must not let anyone know how to find me-- not here, not now, not ever.

It’s not that far to the coast, only a half-hour drive. The sun’s setting into the vague afternoon fog, that hunches around the Santa Monica pier this time of year. It’s a beautiful day.

For a drowning.

Slo-Mo Lipstick

Time slowed down for Buck.

As Lola punched him again and again, he observed her perfectly applied lipstick---how the tiny vertical lines in the skin of her quivering upper lip looked like cherry-red ink spikes on a Richter scale. And Lola’s paper-white blouse—as she’d wrestled him to the ground—it had remained perfectly clean and starched, as if it had been freshly retrieved from the dry cleaner’s.

When the cop finally pulled the pummeling Lola off Buck’s supine body, Buck couldn’t help but notice that one of Lola’s open-toed pumps had come to rest about 30 feet from where she had assaulted him, in the dry, un-watered grass of Jackie’s front yard. It looked like a miniature scene of an overturned farm implement, abandoned in an open field, which had gone to seed.

As the cop helped Buck rise to his feet, Buck’s punch-dirty body felt like he’d been stripped nude, dipped in honey, and left to endure a million slow-motion stings of the buzzing occupants of an angry apiary.

Why does Lola feel that she needs to wear lipstick, anyway?

Left Hook

From a distance, it appeared that two bodies were writhing in tangled lovemaking. But why would two people make love in broad daylight on the brown, un-watered lawn of this Melrose home? Even in LA, you didn’t often see this kind of spectacle.

As the police approached, it was clear that a woman and man were doing something on the lawn, but as the two officers cautiously drew closer to the lump of human conflict that thrashed about in front of them, it became clear that it was far from love that was being made.

The first cop jumped in and pulled the dainty blond combatant off the punch-pummeled body of the man that lie underneath her. Lola threw one last punch at Buck, who now all too viscerally understood that nothing hurts so much as the searing sting of a fuming ex-girlfriend’s well-placed left hook.

Hoped You Were Dead.

Lola’s mind filled with a kind of black mental grease that covered and clouded everything; her thoughts, her memory, even the pathways of the sensations that futilely tired to run from her spider-like fingers and reed-thin arms, to her brain. “Buck?” she stammered, as she desperately clutched her driver’s license. She looked up into Buck’s similarly stunned, yet surprisingly expressionless face. Everything escaped from her—--every thought of control, of location, of who she was now. “Buck? Buck. I hoped you were dead.”

Bridge-Building

Hadn’t he met her half-way, in fact, more than half-way? Richard pictured love as an expansive river over which two lovers, typically, built a bridge toward one another. Aren’t we supposed to meet in the middle? he thought. A current of fear ran through him now, as he imagined that he was building the entire bridge himself. At first, he pictured Lola, innocently standing on the other side, her dainty hands seemingly beckoning him, but as he approached her, he could see she was really waving him away, as if she had decided bridge-building was not for her. Richard feared he was about to fall now, into the deepest, darkest flow of the speeding torrent.

Backing-up into the Future?

Following the unmistakable thud of the collision, Lola grabbed her purse and jumped out of her little car. She skittered around the back, and immediately bent over the right rear fender to see how much damage she’d done. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad—after all, she’d only been going a few miles an hour, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to maneuver out the tight parking space in front of Jackie's house. As she examined the damage to her car, the driver of the car she’d bumped, a man who appeared to be in his early thirties, approached her with his drivers license in one hand, and his sunglasses in the other. Lola didn't immediately look up, but if she had, she would have seen that the man who approached her walked towards her with an oddly familiar gait. She would have seen that he was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, and cowboy boots.