sweetheart redux

Hello! Here is the first chapter of a long short story or short novella I wrote. Wild Animals She was mine and I was hers Gambled hard and split the purse A patient and her patient nurse She was mine and I was hers       1 Wild Animal Some of the damage caused by my mother, Gloria, scorched the earth, and sometimes those who adored her wished we’d never known her, wished we’d never even been born.  I adored her, but to adore her, one had to figuratively roll one’s eyes at about half her declarations, especially when they were slurred.  One had to figuratively shrug one’s shoulders in a gesture like “That’s our Gloria,” though only in response to a benign destruction.  Only when she was just telling white lies or asking to borrow money while joking that she’d never pay it back. “I never, ever imagined myself with kids,” she said once.  “I know, you hate it when I talk about having you -- you think I sound too object...

 Hello friends, this here is #9 of the zine I published in middle school and high school, published April 1996. 

21. "Why do you love me so much?" Beth asked George once, and he was so irritated by the question that he was tempted to pretend he hadn’t heard.  The question had so little to do with what effect his love for her had on him; she was really just asking him to tell her about herself.  It was so selfish.  But oh, how could he not give in to this request.  It was the innocence at the base of her selfishness that was one of the most irresistible things about her. "Oh Beth, he replied, "I don't know, you're just special," and then what he'd never actually said to her before, "I really do love you." Now, he brought the bedside phone into the bathroom so as not to wake the three gently sighing sleepers in the hotel room, and he dialed Beth's home number, just in case.  No answer.

15.             Pulling into the parking lot of the South Philadelphia Sheraton, a person is usually struck by the unlikely combination of the landscapes comprising the neighborhood.  The hotel sits close to a 4-lane highway that parallels the Delaware River, across which you can see the murky land of New Jersey.  There is an empty derelict button factory across the highway, spooky to pass by on foot because it is full of howling ghosts.  But right next door to this abandoned building is Penn's Landing, a festive combination of fairgrounds, shops and restaurants intended for tourists.  People seldom walked on the sidewalks in this stretch of the city -- the parking structures fed directly into the shops and fairgrounds, but if one were to stroll alongside the highway, one would come to an area of gas stations and discount stores with their signs written in Spanish, eventually bleeding into a recently gentrifi...

9. George loved to buy drinks for Beth, he loved to be around her when she drank, because when she drank, she became so relaxed and so much kinder, and she almost never lost control by becoming too drunk, at least not for the first several years.   She just became happy, when normally she was guarded and dour. It was a dark and stormy night.   There was something they'd been talking about that George couldn't stop turning over in his mind as he sat in his car in the bar's parking lot, watching the neon light of the sign catch on the rain drops and turn them red on his windshield, while he waited for the car's engine to warm up. He'd told Beth about driving Molly to Josie's house, not worrying about betraying Molly's whereabouts on a school night, because it never occurred to Beth to worry about her daughter. "Josie's probably having more problems with this man she used to see.   I overheard the two of them talking about it," -- a...