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When her toes touched the floor, it was as if the positions had been ordained by a computing machine and her unerring feet guided to them within the pin pricks of a laser. They were crisp, economical, swift – lovely. It was certain that if she danced the same sequence a thousand times, there would be no variance. Erik remembered tall, slender shorebirds of impeccable grace stepping deftly, automatically, over wavelets and obstacles of the sea’s deposition. Their legs, like this woman’s, always looked to have wills and memories of their own.

… didn’t ya notice? Globe doesn’t have a graveyard.”

“No? I thought every western town had a boot hill.”

“Well, they planned to, but the first time they tried to bury somebody, somethin’ odd happened. There come up such a thunderstorm, the arroyos filled up and flooded the whole town. The place they had staked out for the graveyard was clean under water, and they had to go several miles up the road to find a dry spot. Up there by the first big bend in the road. It’s so overgrown with weeds now, you prob’ly never noticed it.

“Well, sir, the next time a citizen passed on, and they got set to plant him, there was such lightning that it struck some dead cactuses and started a big brush fire. It burned down four – no, five – buildings, and the buryin’ party had to scatter to keep from gettin’ burned up itself. At that point, some o’ the more church-minded citizens decided maybe God was tryin’ to tell ’em somethin’, so they put the second corpse right alongside the first one and built a church on the cemetery site. That went O.K., so they figured they’d got the message right.”

“Maybe the right message from the wrong god,” Maria said hoarsely without looking up.

“How’s that?” asked the guest, but she only smiled at him and let her husband answer.

“The Navajo won’t have a thing to do with places where people have died. They won’t go near one. They believe the dead can bring sickness and all sorts o’ bad luck to the living. They think the best thing to do with a house somebody died in is to burn it or tear it up so much the weather’ll knock it down.”

… When I went home the other night, I saw a coyote. Just up the road here. It ran right across in front of the car.”

For the first time the serenity, all the composure, drained from Maria’s rugose cheeks. Now her eyes were portals to a fright mounting inside, and she lay down her fork gravely. “You should have come back here. As soon as you saw it. That was a bad sign, a very bad sign.”

“Come back? Why?”

“Ma’ii. Ma’ii is an evil animal. If a hunter or a warrior saw him on the trail, he would turn back. He would not take the chance after the sight of ma’ii.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s Navajo beliefs, Erik. You know, like a black cat is to some folks.”

There had never lived a black cat to produce the eerie stare transfixing him. “It is the worst of animals. Death has no power over it. Its life is in its tail and the end of its nose. You can destroy the rest of him, yet he pulls himself together and comes to life again. Some of the old men had seen this.”

My novel, Ghost Town, is available at Amazon.com, and following is a short excerpt from it.

The scientist among the spectators knew much of the laws of physics, of force and motion and friction and gravity, but she repealed them all. Weightless and soundless, she was beauty embodied and filled the space with lines voluptuously curved and straighter than Euclid or God himself could have produced. Her face promised an eternity of love and youth. She was there in the dingy theatre, but she was at once no nearer than a nebula of stardust.

On this website, one sees a good deal about artist, Helen West Heller. This note is only to announce that 2022 is the 150th anniversary of her birth.  Read more about her here.

By the second season following, she had matured into the world’s premier woman sprinter. She had made a shambles of the national AAU meet, and her times proved that not even the cream of the Marxist damsels were in her class. By then, too, the young black girl was something of a folk hero, rising from obscurity to magnetize media people all across the wide land. Her somewhat empty glance was crystallized on scores of glossy covers. Never chary of herself, Lizabeth Sue gladly granted interviews with all comers, and, being as uncoached in grammar as in her sport, she endeared herself to youth everywhere. On the occasion of her single, live television appearance, she had said …

20 June 2022

I just learned that my novel, Black Keys, is now available at Amazon.com. Following is an excerpt.

She intercepted the car door with a relentless grip and stared madly inside at David and his wife. Flakes of snow danced wildly around her head. “l love her!” she skirled defiantly and clawed the air. “l love her!” Long after the white curtain obscured her she stood in the road protesting the death in a shrill lament and daring the powers of the universe.

My proof copy of a great novel, Black Keys, is in the post to me. It will be available at Amazon.com soon, and I’ll announce that here. Please tune in now and then.

I can’t take credit for creating it, but welcome to my nicely remodeled website. Read about two of my novels and a children’s book, illustrated by my wife, all available at amazon.com, plus an exciting new novel coming soon.

REVIEW OF “BUN-BUN’S AMAZING TRAVELS”

“The story is told with elegance, and, of course, I love … the ballet studio. Jane’s illustrations are delightful, their tone perfectly calibrated to the tone of your story. Congratulations on it!”

Mindy Aloff, editor, essayist, journalist, and dance critic

Author, Dance Anecdotes, 2006

Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World, 2011