“Commitment is the promise of a love that never fades.” (Popular adage) That morning, I was giving a regular class when something unusual happened at the end of my presentation. One of the students, sitting right in front of me, while the others gathered their belongings and left the classroom, addressed me. He told me […]

“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” (Diane Arbus, photographer, born New York, 1923) In French, the entry or expression “déjà-vu” has a primary meaning of ‘what is familiar, of what is not new’ (“Ce qui n’est pas nouveau“), in addition to the more figurative […]

Sometimes, after attending Sunday night mass, Joe would take his girlfriend to eat pizza at Woulddo Lime Street, which was about three miles from the parish they attended. Although it had the (angelical) Italian name Raffaeluccio, at the time it was a place that offered something acceptable and digestible, although not a verace Neapolitan pizza. […]

Lower middle class residential area. After consulting an on-call astrologer and an amateur poet, who lived near the drooling resident of #96, Joe was notified that the chaste girl Nikole Mandy Beniston, a brunette, who lived in #77, was positioned 180 degrees in the zodiacal plane in relation to his position (one was the sign […]

Joe dated for the first time after entering college, because before that he had no time; he was only studying. A real, real nerd one. He had a childish passion, and had wanted to date a girl before, but fortunately (in his later understanding) it had not worked out, he recalled. He met his first […]

(Haddeté Phojes Beguesse, Vallée du Loir, 1993) Salut !… J’ai composé ce poème pour toi lors d’un 24 juillet inoubliable. Tu m’as dit que tu étais mon éternelle petite amie, Petite, blonde radieuse, aux yeux bleu ciel si clairs, Peau et pommettes roses, Son beau visage, tyrolien ou trentaine, la peau douce d’une jeune montagnarde. Au […]

Joe owned a rental apartment building and had some employees in a condominium at Manchester placed near Saint Paul, in a relatively upscale area. In the most modest district of the region, Blossom Village, there was a significant portion of the population that adjusted to jobs that were not specialized, in the noblest areas, and […]

Veneto is one of the twenty administrative regions (equivalent to a federated state) of Italy. It is located in the north-eastern portion, bordering Austria in a small strip of less than twenty miles. It has seven provinces and 563 municipalities. Venice is its administrative center, principal city. Vicenza is the province of origin of my […]

When I was a child, I had the impression that nightclubs were places of general perdition. There was a lot of talk about nightclubs in the 1960s, but they were a place to be ignored by “good people,” according to my family interlocutors. When I told Joe about this, he was impressed by the coincidence […]

The newly engaged couple got permission from the girl’s parents to go to an event (an opening) in the uptown part of the city known as Big Spike. They were accompanied by a friend of the young man, and two other girls, neighbors to the girlfriend. After the vernissage, and upon getting into the vehicle, […]

Joe met Teddy sometime after he had moved to Sunlurk, near Tornearth. They were introduced to each other in a tavern, where the Spaniard had been gathering his friends for a long time, on Wednesdays, to play blackjack. In fact, that was when he met most of the neighbors he still associates with today, many […]

Human beings have the strange peculiarity of making a brutal effort to swallow a bitter pineapple while letting the honey drip through their fingers. Put up keep are you! The short stories presented herein dialogue with this disturbing anthropological capacity. They are the result, in most cases howling, of narratives that I heard from various […]

“Memories are always precious, they are memories which will stay, and even though the time goes by, they will never be taken away.” Susan Smith Joe had started dating Diamond a week earlier. The rule was to visit her only during weekends, although they used to speak on the phone daily. Joe was radiant and […]