I Sleep Well Here at Lance Road

The house was the color of Southeastern Florida beach sand. That shade of sand was darker than oatmeal and lighter than pine tree bark. Leading up to the front door was a four-car wide driveway, and a path through the bright green grass was made by the clicking of flip flops on the way to the simple, yet lightly faded brown, front door. The house was strong, and nicknamed “Lance Road” because of it’s likeness to the seven-time winner of the Tour De France, U.S.A. cyclist Lance Armstrong. I slept well there at Lance Road.
About once a month I heard the late night dull pitch of a siren and the Florida East Coast Railroad train passing through on it’s way from Jacksonville to Miami, or vice versa. I never really knew what the siren was for, maybe the night black railroad bridge with lined with wooden railroad ties and steel track. Or maybe that siren was for a neighborhood water pump out station filled to capacity because of the drenching rains that blanketed the area during the start of this year’s rainy season. I hadn’t had a chance to discover what that siren really was. The sound came late… Sometime like after two or three a.m. 99 percent of the time, after 4 a.m. was when I slept well there at Lance Road.

Short story I'm working on called: 72 degrees and Sunny

I used to walk the green chain-link fences separating the International Tennis Center from the courts where only elite and professional players participated. I was seven, and already had what felt like arthritis in my fingers. Sharp pains, unexpected bends.. They always seemed to stretch out one-second or so after I made an effort to extend them. I could usually feel the muscle against the bone. Anyways, I walked the fence for one reason, I wanted a ball stamped with the ATP, that’s Associated of Tennis Professionals for those that aren’t so luckily sports inclined as I am. On this day there were no balls. The landscaping crew must have eaten them up with their Dixie Chopper ride-on-lawnmowers. It was hot… I ventured across the busy avenue, named after the ocean to the east, and into the Taj Mahal, Cathedral if you will… The 72-degree air conditioned downtown library, filled with homeless avoiding the heat reading comic books, about Dale Earnhardt and to my amusement the Financial Times.
In the library you could hear a pin drop. Some patrons slept, others worked on betterment of education and in the back west corner a newpaper writer typed about a bank robber, a criminal that used the disguise of a William H. Jefferson mask. “Fucking Bill Clinton!” He wanted to type as the headline. The library gala was last night and to the reporter’s amazement, Bill had fucking entered the downstairs of the library with a 30.06 rifle, and a need for the thousands of dollars of uncounted gala donations. To be continued…