Category: Fiction

Certain neighbourhood traditions no one can explain other than to say they keep repeating themselves. The inhabitants of five houses near Beach and Wharncliffe enjoyed one another’s company enough, a shade of curiosity perhaps, that their lives intermingled four or five times a year. If most of these families lived as much as a mile apart they would have nothing to do with one another, but they were close neighbours and their proximity to one another, over the years, had manufactured a bond of friendship that appeared indestructible. It wasn’t, of course. The Browns, occupying a sixth house for years, had moved a few miles up the highway two years earlier and no one had heard from them since.

He looked at the movie poster in the window beside the unused ticket seller’s booth. It was from the 1945 film noir, Edgar Ulmer’s “Detour”, a good, creepy film as he remembered, starring Tom Neal and the deliciously-named Ann Savage.

Gloria hesitated and simply stared at the enchanting woman; over seventy-years-old and dressed in white from the top of her head – wrapped with a veil-type material – to her ankles, where her long sheer dress ended. She wore a red sash around her hefty waist. Yellow beads hung from her neck, and various bracelets, also beaded, lined her wrists.

“Your first time.” the woman said as a matter of fact.

She thought it was old-fashioned, in a way, the way they married. There they were, a hip couple of Baltimore artists, Billy a musician and she a painter, living in the eclectic neighborhood of Mt Vernon. They were not the type, she thought, who got married because of an accidental pregnancy. And they did not do it because it was the right thing to do, though their Midwestern upbringing could have arisen something ingrained in them. They did it because, at the time, it "felt" right.