Around Desire (eBook)

Randy Russell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
192 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-9634-0 (ISBN)

Infos

'Around Desire' follows the parallel lives of two people during the period of lockdown during a global pandemic-and how they deal with day-to-day life, and love, in an upturned society. As the world rapidly changes around them, how do they deal with the insanity? And will their paths lead them to find each other?

Randy Russell has published a book of short stories, Love, Lies, Bleeding, as well at the novels, Sad as the Day I was Born, Black Iris, and The Doughnuts. More information and writing can be found on his website, RSPEEN.COM, which is updated nearly every day. Mr. Russell currently resides in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His band, Love Me Avenue, which eschews recording and avoids any online presence, continues to perform for a very small, select audience, on Earth.

---

"e;Around Desire"e; is an intimate portrait of two slightly acquainted characters, dealing with their daily lives, six months into the lockdown of a global pandemic. On the surface, it's a sometimes humorous, slightly satirical romance, but it's also a poetic snapshot of our early Twentieth Century's soon-to-be-mis-remembered collective global trauma. As a heightened documentation of the day-to-day life of two individuals, it's also a gently comic, dystopian, pseudo-memoir, as well as a somewhat lyrical modern ghost tale. And at its heart, ideally, it's a respectful and sober prayer for hope.

Textauszug

GARDEN

CECILIA STARKWEATHER WAS IN HER GARDEN. The rain looked like it was going to hold off. She had an easel set up, and a small canvas—20 inches tall by 16 inches wide—on which she made preliminary sketches and marks. Her oils and brushes were ready. She wanted to get a good start, because it might be raining by tomorrow—and who knew when the next good painting day would be.

In front of her was her quince tree, the centerpiece of the garden. It wasn’t her tree, of course, but then, who did a tree belong to, really? She rented, but she had lived at the Belvedere Court Apartments for nearly twenty years, and she had eventually inherited use of the largest garden plot. She was not planning on giving it up anytime soon.

Oil painting was time-consuming in that there was a lot of preparation and cleanup, so you needed large blocks of time—preferably entire days—for your work. And that’s something that Cecilia hadn’t had in the last decade, or longer, with work, and especially since she had taken co-ownership of The Golden Lute, a local tavern that featured live music every day of the year. It was the most consuming, satisfying thing she had ever done—but it left very little time for painting—her most beloved passion since she was old enough to remember.

“I would have to pick oil painting. In nature.” She laughed, as she looked up at the sky, active with turbulent clouds, moving in from the Pacific. The wind picked up, but the rain held off, and she was able to spend the entire morning laying the groundwork for her painting—a naturalistic depiction of the largest, most perfect quince, hanging in the smallish tree. It was the most beautiful quince she had ever seen.

Cecilia had decided on the Autumnal Equinox as a kind of symbolic day to begin her painting, but also, she had been waiting for the quince to look just right. The danger was, you never knew when the rainy season was going to start in earnest. It had been a fairly dry September, so far.

She skipped lunch and just kept working until she was exhausted. When the light started to fail, she picked some overly ripe tomatoes and basil, left the paints and easel, and headed inside. Her cat, Lucy, a big, orange, tabby, greeted her. Lucy had wondered if Cecilia was ever going to come back. The life of a cat is not exactly a stress-free existence. You can try to tell the cat, “Don’t worry!”—but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all to a cat.

Lucy quickly recovered, happy for an early dinner. Cecilia wasn’t much of a gardener—she had been too busy, in past years, but the previous summer, during the pandemic, she had concentrated on it a bit more. She always had a good supply of tomatoes, but in previous years her basil always fell victim to something—too much or too little dampness or sun, or slugs, or rabbits, or marauding, pesto-loving hipsters. The mint and parsley thrived, pretty much all year around, with little help from her.

When she and her husband, at the time, David, had scored an apartment at the Belvedere Court—one of the older, more personality-rich apartment complexes in town—they were assigned one of the smaller garden plots. One of the features of the Belvedere was a huge garden area with good sunlight, divided up into an uneven patchwork of individual plots, separated by a hodgepodge of cobbled together walls, fences, latticework dividers—affording each gardener with some degree of privacy.

Whenever one of the longtime tenants would move out, it would initiate a musical chairs scramble of apartments and garden plots. No two apartments at the Belvedere were the same—different sizes, different features—as if it had been built in the manner of the Winchester Mystery House or a similar roadside attraction of American eccentricity.

After Cecilia and David had split up—and he moved across town—she moved into one of the Belvedere’s smaller units. It was different enough in character to help her put aside some of the sad memories. She had also, finally, inherited the largest of the garden plots—the one with the old quince tree right in the middle. For a while—in an attempt to take the focus off the failure of her marriage—she had focused, more than anything, on that garden.

QUINCE

OTHER OIL PAINTINGS from that summer—the summer of the pandemic—leaned up against the walls, on the edges of bookcases, on the kitchen counters. It had been the time for it—living in near isolation—and Cecilia felt that her painting had improved. Certainly her productivity had gone through the roof.

She considered herself a bit old-fashioned when it came to painting, using traditional methods, high quality paints from an esteemed local paint artisan—not cheap. Her paintings where small, but carefully composed and intricate of detail. They were extremely naturalistic, but not quite to the level of photorealism—which seemed to her more of a stunt. She tried to put something of herself into each painting—but who knows—it was a highly personal, private endeavor at this point.

She had studied art at school, at Evergreen—but before she was able to settle on grad school, the opportunity to buy The Golden Lute had some along, which had been all-consuming—along with her relationship with David, of course. Perhaps her plans had been derailed, but life was like that. Cecilia was one to put all of her focus and energy into one thing at time—whatever it happened to be—and so, for the time being—which turned out to be years—it was owning and operating a restaurant/bar/performance venue.

After dinner, Lucy sat on her lap as she opened her laptop on the kitchen table and briefly checked the news. No vaccine yet, continuing protests, downtown, and a celebrity death. Then she searched halfheartedly for a movie she was obsessed with—was it streaming somewhere? It wasn’t easy to find because it was a Spanish language film and seemed to have multiple titles: El sol del membrillo, The Sun of the Quince, The Quince Tree Sun, Dream of Light. It was an odd documentary about the Spanish painter, Antonio López García—the film by Víctor Erice.

She had seen it on the big screen—though she couldn’t remember where, exactly—either at the Film Center, or during a film festival, somewhere. Her initial impression was that it was long, pretentious, and confusing. It showed—in painstaking detail—the painter attempting to render a quince tree in his garden, in Madrid, as the weather sets in. As soon as the next day—after she saw it—Cecilia’s obsession with the film set in. She tried to see it a second time, but it wasn’t showing again. Neither the library nor the excellent local video store had a DVD copy. It became one of those memories that is elevated as time goes on.

Of course, once she came into possession of the garden plot with the quince tree, the memory of the film was supplanted by her desire to, to some degree, recreate the experience by painting a quince herself. Finally, the fruit of the tree had ripened. She picked out the best quince—the one she would paint. And now the weather had set in.

RAIN

IT RAINED AND RAINED, but the timing was good because Cecilia had to attend an extended video chat with the other four owners of The Golden Lute: Katie, Bob, Michael, and her ex, David. She hated these things. She imagined all over the world people hated these things. Were there some people who liked them? Who were those weirdos? Of course, for some people, working from home was a dream come true. Or maybe not quite a dream come true, but better than going into that bloodless, fluorescent-lit, office cubical, suit and tie and dress shoes, at exactly 8 a.m. every morning, Monday through Friday. The horror.

They all lived in different parts of town, and they each reported news of things opening up, here and there. In each of their meetings, they discussed their options. They didn’t want to re-open prematurely, forcing their workers off unemployment, only to have to lay them off again as the virus mutated, and again closed things down.

By now, every possible wrinkle, metaphor, and movie comparison—when discussing the pandemic—had gotten old. They decided that the best course of action at this point was to wait and see.

There was another option, however, that they couldn’t ignore. When they had bought the old, neighborhood, corner tavern, which had been operating since the 1930s, it hadn’t been cheap, but as they built it into an esteemed performance venue, they managed to pay off the bank and erase their debts. But as the city had changed and real estate had gone through the roof, they were no longer able to ignore the possibility of selling the building to the highest bidder.

“I couldn’t stand to see it become an Inception Coffee,” Cecilia sighed, each time the subject came up.

The others argued that they could pass it on to someone who promised to keep its spirit alive. But they all knew how much promises were worth. Things changed, but the one constant was that money changed minds and warped perspectives.

“Better an Inception Coffee than an AT&T store,” noted David. The most lucrative offers had come from major corporations who seemed to mindlessly raze the community of anything with personality.

“Why not just tear it down and build a brand-new Walgreens?”

They were getting nowhere, so they decided to end the meeting. The best part of the session was...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.4.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-9634-0 / 9798350996340