[short story excerpt]

I am a writer riding a bus. Although I am also a guy overly familiar with the canned copy of technical support centers, this afternoon, it’s just me and my scribbled shopping list of edible bachelor basics riding a mostly empty bus from point A to point B.

Since I published a book once, I like to think of myself as a writer on my days off. It was not overly popular, my novel, but I had been quite attached to it. It was about a poet soldier from WWII who was injured on the beaches of Normandy, a guy who never fired a shot, but wrote bad poetry while hiding in the hills with a thousand other injured waiting for rescue.

He returns to the states a hero with no heroism, just poems. His family scorns his literary folly, so he writes secretly and sells his soppy verse to a greeting card company. The kicker comes when he sees his family exchanging his cards on holidays. A success without recognition story, a battle of societal image versus internal calling. I was pretty happy with it.

Turns out it was good enough to have a second-rate, paying publisher take it on. And they did some halfway decent marketing, which seems to be the real battle—or so my friends of similar success in mediocrity have said.

Today, though, I am just any guy riding the bus through the up and down and sideways, rough, whacked out streets of South San Francisco. Or at least I was. In my half-dazed waiting and counting down of stops, I have uncharacteristically looked up and down the bus benches and recognized a paperback novel cover.

It is my book. The book.

I can see my name. It’s in ridiculously small print. But there it is below the silhouette of a contorted soldier, sunlight streaming across his helmet, and loose papers in his hand. Never cared for the cover, even the back is banal, just text, no author photo even. But when they’re sending a check, you just nod, afraid to jostle the fragility of this pinnacle life moment.

So, there it is, in the slender hand of a young woman. She is not a beautiful creature in any traditional sense but that fixed look of concentration, that distracted, faraway atmosphere about her, the way her head leans on her curled hand—I am entranced. I study her thin face, the narrow purple painted lips, the garish red hair. Is that a dye job gone wrong or purposely overdone? I vote for the latter, wanting her to be a woman in charge of her destiny. She chose to have sickly red hair; she chose to read my book. She is smart and introspective and is gleaning from those pages all my intent, my pain, all those contortions of the two years it took to write, re-write, cut and coddle the story, the characters, and my ego.

I am in love …

This story is currently looking for a publication to call home. I’ll update here when it finds it!