SNIPPETS FROM THE TRILOGY

Sons And Sisters.
>After their initial purchase at the Angel Trading Post the four were never seen together again.
>What might my family, my friends, my social class think were I found murdered in these slums?
>…strange one. Half child.
>I wondered what they do to horse thieves in Transylvania.
>”…if you’re suggesting what I think, you’re both insane.”
>In their obscure dialect they inseminated the prelude to symbiosis of man and object.
>When the incident of that night comes to mind, I shudder.
>Telephones of old friends are disconnected. Leon is rebuilding the Red Army.
>…he hadn’t responded to the part about shooting people.
>How came I to this forsaken place?
>In one of my spells of madness I found myself watching the dawn from a parapet uncertain how I had gotten there.

The Enormous Victorian.
>”I chose a different path.”
>”It will protect me in the booby hatch.”
>…asked me why in my father’s image over the fireplace the artist had painted a white feather in my father’s left eye.
>”I hope she doesn’t invite her talking coyote into the house for tea.”
>The Committee hunted on the New York East Side, in labor unions, colleges, sweatshops, speakeasies.
>It was the first time I’d ventured into his bed.
>”I saw a few Indians. I’m not sure they were patients, exactly. He was running experimental studies on them.”
>Odell wobbled sideways, straining to regain his balance, did a halfspin, back-stepping as he began falling backward against the single two-by-four replacement for the missing wall and as that one-board railing gave way, wide-eyed, open-mouthed he disappeared into the darkness.
>”I never expected a happy ending.”

Elegies in a Country Shoebox
>”Mr. Slade don’t worry about lawsuits.”
>The word ‘pregnant’ turned him pale.
>”Jay wound up alone with this crazy man, your father.”
>Two of us, said Mabrouk, and tonight we were guests of an ambassador.
>They are dangerous psychos.
>The public could still be regimented by the old methods business had employed…
>Here came Dr. Mouse now, with shirtsleeves rolled up, cradling shiny implements in a steaming white hotel towel.
>She was drinking bitterness, facing down the daughter of a murderer.
>Naturally, as we proclaimed ourselves the aggrieved party, the police blamed the strikers.
>I’d gotten stuck on how could my mother abandon me.
>Miscegenation, they label it, punishable here by death.
>Since the killing in the desert I’ve felt tense.
>”You may yet bring redemption to the ice castles of the Slade empire.”
©2017