CONTENTS
To Remember a Madam | Thomas Crone
Romeo Void | Chris King
Weathering Storms | Judith Kelvin Miller
April Kodiak | by Stefene Russell
O, God Let Heaven Be A Burlesque Show | Melissa Singleton
Gossip | Orhan Veli
Weathering Storms |
by Judith Kelvin Miller
On our first date, we attended the play Dracula. The theater later became the Hydra Sponge Company; later still, a parking lot.
After the theater, we had ice cream at the original Cyrano’s. A few years later, Cyrano’s burned down.
The bouquet for our wedding was bought from a sweet, deaf, elderly lady. A few years later, a robber murdered her; the site of the flower shop eventually became a Church’s Fried Chicken parking lot.
We were married by a drunken judge in his temporary quarters. The spot of our nuptials became the ladies room of a pizza restaurant; the judge was not re-elected.
The evening of our first day of marriage we dined at a Flaming Pit restaurant. A few years later, that Flaming Pit burned down. The entire chain eventually folded.
Our early, tentative, forays into the edges of intimacy began upon the top deck of the river cruise boat Admiral. Thirty-two years after our wedding, the Admiral, resurrected as a permanently-docked casino, was ripped from its moorings by an errant set of barges. The Admiral, the seed of our beginnings, survived to rock upon the current for the future.
That, at least, must be a good sign.
Judith Kelvin Miller is a retired molecular biologist. She. lives in Clayton with her husband. Her publications include a children’s science fiction story in "Beyond Centauri" (January, 2009); a short story in the Cave Hollow Press anthology "Murder, Mystery, Madness, Magic, and Mayhem" (2003); a personal essay in the journal "Bibliophilos" (2004); and a poem, accepted for "Night Roses" anthology "Cocktail Shaker #3."