Brushing her teeth before bed, Ruby Arenas stared at the smooth, soft contours of her face in the bathroom mirror. She also reflected on the cool Black man at the bar who looked like a 70s Blaxploitation movie star and called her “sister.” She never thought of herself as Black because she wasn’t Black, her […]
To set the mood for the upcoming protest rally on the beach, RayRay pounded the drum skins and slammed a high-hat cymbal with the primitive power of a caveman banging brontosaurus bones on a boulder, belting out a tribal solo as the leader of the bar’s Saturday night house rock band. Outside on the cracked […]
One by one, about a hundred gulls appeared in the sky from the east, circling the paint-chipped dinghy that bobbed like a homemade fishing lure about 100 yards off the Clearwater Beach coast. Making worse noise than an English new wave band, the man duct-taped to the mast couldn’t get away from the mad cacophony […]
First Sam brushed the driftwood gently to remove sand and dirt. Then he softly blew on the wood from all angles to alert whatever unseen organisms might live on or in the wood, giving the tiniest specks of life a chance to move out or fly away. Then he soaked the driftwood in a pail […]
Just like that, out of nowhere, Sam Bennett delivered to a stranger on the beach an impromptu ornithology lesson. “A gull can eat up to 20 percent of its body weight in food each day,” the shriveled sun-cured senior citizen said. “That’s a lot of french fries,” Marty Durkin said. “A group of gulls is […]
