"Desire"

[Brad Rose]

I can’t stand the color pink,” Jessie scowled. “Who… I mean, what idiot, would have made plastic Flamingos, pink, for God’s sake? They should be black—all black, with tiny white eyes and dark gray beaks.”

Jessie hated everything in this dilapidated west-side trailer park —the mobile homes, the pavement, the utility hook ups, the weary decorative flamingos, and, most of all, the residents. The whole sorry place seemed to slump lower than a swamp, between the two towering Florida freeway overpasses, which sped their oblivious drivers on to the wealthier, palm-shaded suburbs where no one had ever laid foot, let alone ever lived, in a “mobile home.”

“And who the fuck,” Jessie queried, “would have the balls to name a shithole place like this, ‘Desire’?”

[Brad Rose]

Sorry Grey! I knew this story couldn't avoid stepping on someone's toes.

[Angela]

It's not a total shithole. I live there.

[Jeanette Cheezum]

I heard it was his grandfather. Now I know where those hideous things came from. Thanks Brad. Good job.

[Brad Rose]

Hey Gita. You are so right. I grew up in LA, near one of the first post-War mass housing developments, called "Lakewood". Look it up on google. Wow! What a mass housing masterpiece/messsterpiece. It was rolled out like linoleum. Anyway, in Lakewood, neither a lake, nor a wood, could be found. Just concrete.

[Joe Gensle]

Your telling delivered on my ability to envision the shit-hole and the ending's just 'trick!'

[Joseph Lupoli]

@ Mike...And the stripper should be covered in hideous tattoos, and her desecrated flesh topped off with a couple of facial scars--the result of her drunkenly steering her lime-green Chevy pick-up truck into a telephone pole. But she's still reasonably attractive because she can't afford fake breasts. Damn, did I continue Brad's very entertaining story?

@ Brad: I so love a descriptive story that keeps me interested. well done!

[Mike Handley]

Reminiscent of Carl Hiaasen ... The only things absent are road kill, a stripper, Chiclet-teethed Skink and a pit bull.