Reed Coleman - Little Easter

My short story about the Japanese visitors got finished somewhere in between the settling pebbles. East End Monthly had accepted it for publication and was scheduled to run the story in July. They paid pretty well, and I was fairly pleased that my relatives would finally be able to read a bit of my work in a publication somewhat more available than Pravda. I even had the gall to start calling myself a writer, though I wasn’t at the point of having cards printed attesting to that fact.

The only writing I’d done lately was in letter form. Every afternoon since the Little League parade, I’d been hauling my ass and pad and pen into the Scupper. MacClough and I would share a round and one of us would pump a few quarters into the jukebox. I played “Crazy” once, by accident, but Johnny just let it go. He’d been doing a lot of that lately. Letting go, I mean. After our drink, he’d head out back to change a keg and I’d retire to a dark table where I’d work on my letter to Marie Antoinette Gilbeau.

Confessing my guilt was the easy part. Making sense of the events since Christmas Eve was not. After failing at several attempts to explain things away with a factual recounting, I described Dugan’s Dump to my Cajun pen pal. I concluded that our lives were a lot like the houses in Dugan’s Dump. We’re, most of us, born into a world of bright dreams and clipper ships, but those dreams often dim, forcing us to build lonely rafts out of once proud ships. I hoped that she would understand.