The Strange Recital

"Two men. Orson Welles and Marlon Brando. They veered off road somewhere in the Sonoran desert. South of the border. They crashed into a saguaro cactus. The top swayed and dropped like an alien green chandelier. The rooftop buckled. The windshield cracked. Orson's silver hair was askew as he stumbled out of the baby blue Coupe DeVille. He shouted out into the desert plain. 'Kiki!'" It begins at lunch. An epic struggle of giants, or a pathetic spat between has-beens? Only the desert stars will tell, or the tiny poodle. And what was in that cactus sauce, anyway?

"The air hung heavy on a cold morning or night in mid-July, depending on whether or not you were able to sleep. Most people had stopped a few years back, instead choosing to watch the news channel, which ran twenty-four hours a day." Journalism goes underground... can it survive? This smart dystopian tale by a high school student suggests a future that might be all too near.

"Lisa looked in the rearview mirror and saw that her eyes had turned black."

Driving cross-country on a relentless chase... what do you do if your body begins to transform into something unknown?

"It was on May Day, feast of spring, that Eleanor first entered the tomb which later became known as the tomb of the two goddesses. Outside the hillside was green and golden, the sea below was sparkling in the sun, life in all its forms was burgeoning."

What happens when you come face to face with ancient myth? Will your life ever be the same?

"He did not remember walking to Way of the Flesh Tattoos and Piercings. All he knew for certain was that he had failed to find his lover last night at the club where she danced for a lounge full of other men."

What is the power of ink on skin? Maybe the artist is a magician. But can love survive the pain?

"Other things are on my mind when the Tupperware lady says, 'First, let's move your couch over by the door and the table here.'"

Really, is this what a member of the Pagan Motorcycle Club does? Beyond wife and mother, can she change who she's always been?

"Around 10 a.m. my journalist friend Paul called and asked me to meet him at the mortuary in Woodstock, and to be prepared to view a corpse. He wouldn't say more."

The intertwining of past and present, a recurring pattern of dates... what is coincidence and what is synchronicity? Has an old threat returned?

"On the fateful day he got up, threw away his remaining shoes, the ones he hadn't eaten—just two pairs, chewed the last strip of leather he had been saving for that day, followed by a slice of toast, and then went to work."

Why would Luis Moreno eat his shoes? Because he'd been planning to for twenty years, of course. Isn't that what real artists do?

"He looked at me. And, at last, I was certain of what I somehow felt I had known all along: this man, seated at the table in front of me, was no man at all. For these were not the eyes of a human." Among medieval documents, an encounter with a mysterious being.... Who is he, and where will it lead?

"I mixed my first martini at five. The morphine was taking its toll. The ceiling receded and the window looked out over the sea. The nurses appeared to be made of wire, sculpted..."

An artist trapped in a desert town in wartime. Or is it hospice? Pencils, doors, bottles, an ancient brass lamp... and the high cost of immortality.