My thoughts are radio waves, with geometric messages, no one, but I, can hear. Whatever I do, I must not let anyone know how to find me-- not here,…

Lola’s mind filled with a kind of black mental grease that covered and clouded everything;  her thoughts, her memory, even the pathways of the sensations that futilely tired to run from her spider-like fingers and reed-thin arms, to her brain.  “Buck?” she stammered, as she desperately clutched her driver’s license.   She looked up into Buck’s similarly stunned, yet surprisingly expressionless face.  Everything escaped from her—every thought of control, of location, of who she was now.…

He'd only known her for six months, but he had the haunting suspicion that he wouldn't know her--really know her any better--even if he they had been dating for a decade. She was strong, yes, seemingly fearless, even if that fearlessness felt like it abutted a kind of deliberate recklessness.

There was something about her, something about the way that Jackie didn't care

what anyone thought of her that gave Buck pause. He both admired and suspected

that this…

I like to take things that don’t belong to me,” Buck confessed.

“Is that why you left?” Lola sneered.

“The story is a little more complex than that, but basically ‘yes.’”

“But I didn’t ‘belong’ to you, Buck, I wasn’t a piece of…

Following the unmistakable thud of the collision, Lola grabbed her purse and jumped out of her little car. She skittered around the back, and immediately bent over the right rear fender to see how much damage she’d done. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad—after all, she’d only been going a few miles an hour, as she tried, unsuccessfully, to maneuver out of the tight parking space in front of Jackie's house. As she examined the damage to her car, the driver of the car she’d…

An imperceptible line runs between love and not love, and it is a gray, ambiguous territory on either side. Sometimes we tread one side, sometimes the other, as if unknowingly crossing and re-crossing an unmarked border.

Lola looked at Jackie, “I was so young, and it was so long ago…back in Boston, when I was still a ‘girl’, still in college. During the first few years of school, I must have dated 35 boys, but all of them were idiots, emptier than a bucket with a big hole in it. By my junior year, I’d stopped dating, completely, because it was a totally futile exercise—a little like Sisyphus pushing a giant bolder up a hill, only to be run over, again and…

Buck turned off his car’s engine, and gazed for a moment at the red tile roofs that seemed to predominate the bungalows in Jackie’s Melrose neighborhood. A strange uneasiness began to cast a shadow over his previously chipper mood---at least his father would have called it ‘chipper.’ He found himself wondering if Jackie felt entirely safe conducting her therapy practice out of her home? What kind of woman would regularly invite the emotionally troubled, the…

Lola angrily tugged the sheets off her bed and crumpled them in the corner, as if they were trash to be discarded, rather than merely laundry to be washed. She fleetingly thought of Richard, and then, momentarily, about her column at LA 29.

Lola then unfurled a set of new, clean sheets, which, like a topsail, gently descended over the naked bed that lay before her, quiet…

A 'disaster' of a boyfriend, a mother who had committed suicide when Lola was just a girl, a father who, back in Boston, defended corporate criminals, and who believed money was love, in fact better than love---how could Lola ever hope to give advice to others about love, life and relationships? She tugged at the Wal-Mart, faux diamond bracelet that Richard had given her, as she worried herself into a mood as empty and abandoned as a…

"My battery is always running out of power," Richard complained, as he snapped shut his clam-shell cell phone.

“You can say that, again,” Lola sniggered, unsparingly.

Richard looked wounded as he gazed at Lola’s smirk and wondered why she was always criticizing him?

“I was referring to my cell…

Matter-of-factly, indeed, blankly, Lola stared into Richard’s eager face and conceded an emotionless, “Yes.”

Richard nearly fainted, but in less than a breath’s time, found himself in Lola’s much-too-small bed. They made love. …