"Loom" Up at Ramshackle Review; Writer's Hotel Series, Cont'd

The first issue of the Ramshackle Review is now up, and it's not only full of stellar writing, but gorgeous as well.

I am so honored to have my piece "Loom" included, and I want to thank Mark. He helped turn my little tale into something truly magical, and I'm indebted.

I tried finding some art to post here using the keyword "beaver," but you cannot imagine what the search results gave me. Or maybe you can imagine. So... no art today.

*

But I do have another writer's hotel! For those times when you've got to get away, far away, retreating as much as you can from the blight that civilization imposes on our creativity. And when you're not really a writer but a Famous Writer With Scads Of Money To Blow.

Hacienda Uayamon

Rustic Mexican, but with a/c and room service. Private, quiet, and look at the desk! Enough room for quill, ink, parchment and an 8x10 of a dead author to keep me company and remind me why I do this.

;)

I love Mexico. I've been a few times, but never anywhere as nice as this. Maybe someday...

Flash Fic: Safe Haven; Hotels for Writers

I could not find a single author/book on my list at the used book store. Came away with some rather odd choices, including a 1990 flip-book of Beijing tourist attractions and a chapbook of strange poetry by a Detroit woman who farmed. I'm not sure what she farmed. I'll let you know when I figure it out. Right now, it appears to be death and afterbirth and pears, but who knows.

*

Safe Haven

Daughter of blue eyes peeled the apple with stubby paring knife: her grandma's, once used to stab a coon in its eye when it crawled in through broken screen over sink. The small room fills with sweet rotted aroma. The apple turns to brown pulp, drips into yellow bowl full of October's fruit. Daughter sloshes brandy over mash. Pulls on her boots. Takes the bowl onto a weak wooden porch and leaves it for overnight fairies and midnight butterflies, visitors such as dragonfly queens and rat kings on their way to safe haven. In the morning, she stills sits beside the bowl, eyes never having closed. Before dawn can touch it, she brings the remainder inside and crawls into the bed of blue eyes. His lips plow through it, and he falls back, drunk on night dreams all the rest of that day. She rests, and wakes at sunset to find there is no more fruit. A whole season's worth of fruit, gone. Spring is six months away.

*

I never get tired of looking at extraordinary hotels all over the world. I am planning my big Book Tour, you see, and at certain points, I will grow weary of the crush of adoring fans and the constant non-stop moving from city to city, and I will need to Get Away. For three days, maybe four, I will be a recluse, even my agent will wonder where I am. Cell off, laptop on but ignoring email. Curled up in cubes of milky foreign sunlight, politely smiling at the random other guest before returning to my tea or glass of wine and my book. And then, Ta dah! I will show up just in time for my next appearance. Perfectly pulled together, Chanel suit and string of pearls, maybe just a slight sheen of perspiration on my cleavage, the only evidence of the passionate tryst I indulged in with the random guest (who was quirky and had a furry chest and smelled like whichever country I was in, and who never learned my name).

Anyway. Hotels for the overburdened author yearning to Get Away, next stop: Norway.

Hotel Mundal.