Nowhere in Particular

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 9-798-35099-563-3

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Salesman

Man and Ocean

It Always Rains on Wednesdays

How to Start a Fire

Liquor? I Hardly Know Her!

Coffee Date

Worse than Poetry

Thanks, Walt

Eden’s Tree

Anxieties and Fugue

Caracatus

Madame Prohkovoda’s

With Apologies to Costner

Songbird

The Silence of the Crowd

Limes, Coconuts

Icarus, Himself

Et tu, Judas

Odds and End

Introduction

I had read once that you couldn’t run from your problems; you had to take a bus or a plane if you really wanted to get away from them. I wasn’t particularly sure if I had problems, but it sounded like a pretty good reason to start running. The next four years I’d covered sixteen states and some five-odd jobs before I found myself a little room in a boarding house. It was smack dab in a collegiate part of the city of Nowhere, U.S.A., behind a big fancy apartment complex that had just gone up the year prior. Corporate somewhere had decided that college kids were definitely not the sort to miss rent payments and constructed their dark grey towers amongst the well-loved and collapsing houses.

I found myself a real job in a kitchen at a restaurant couple blocks away and under an overpass. The pay was decent, and the coworkers weren’t addicts, so it was one of the better jobs I’d had.

Nowhere was a pretty odd place to be most of the time. I started writing stories wrapped up in the things I had seen, and that’s what ended up in here. It’s turned out to be a funny thing- half journal, half storybook, and not in any particular order. I hope you like it.

-eli

The Salesman

As I was