Shortcomingz

By C.S. Torres

This is a collection of short stories on a variety of topics and themes that take place in numerous locations. Some of the stories are plainspoken, others border on magical realism, a few offer a poetic peep into the past, several delve into science fiction and the rest, I hope, are avant-garde.

Human existence is never easy and the characters in the 27 short stories of Shortcomingz really do want it to be! Some escape through visions, others via art or painkillers - literal and figurative. A handful discover the sweet spot, others seek adventure, a few encounter surprises, some experience immortality, and the rest of these personalities live another day as flesh and blood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.S. Torres
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301179169

C.S. Torres

Check out my three ebooks on Smashwords: Mattie's Compass, a Young Adult Novel that combines Sci-Fi as well as Adventure elements; Shortcomingz, an eclectic short story collection (misspelled on purpose...call it one of my shortcomings); and The Vampire Murders, a Thriller set in my hometown of New Orleans. (What better setting for a wicked little Goth Nouveau tale?) I recently finished my fourth book and third novel; I am not uploading it to Smashwords because I am querying prospective agent(s)/publisher(s). This recently completed novel is the story of siblings experiencing a certain haunting by family ghosts. So far, my latest novel became a 2023 Killer Nashville Claymore Award Finalist as well as earned placement on the 2023 Nervous Ghost Press Longlist for Prose. I am waiting for a WIN and a traditional publisher!My foray into the world of screenwriting also includes ten feature screenplays (two are adapted from my books and two are co-authored) and, all of which have placed from Quarterfinalist to Finalist in numerous screenplay contests.Like many writers, I'm an introvert and take the road less traveled. Maybe, if you want to know more about me, you might find clues in my fiction, where some writers hide facts and truths . . . because via my novels, screenplays, and short stories, I hope to speak truth about the human condition - yours, mine, and even those other sometimes under-heard voices, speaking to our existential dilemmas.

Book preview

SHORTCOMINGZ

by C.S. Torres

A Collection of Short Stories

Copyright 2013 by C.S. Torres

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Table of Contents

A Rose by Any Other Name

Desire

Bliss

Limbo

Beached

Not That One Shouldn’t Amuse Oneself (NTOSAO)

Beach Girl

Borderline

Awakening

Boomerang

Cerebrally Yours

No Love Lost

Video Games, Terra Firma, and Handy Taxis

State of Grace

Alone Together

Paradise Eclipsed

Anodyne

Essences and Things (OTALP)

The Boy from Budapest

Silver Lining

Point, Counterpoint

The Poetry of Youth

The Significance of Plum Wine and Bluebells

The Psychic Solution

The Color Green

Perfect Shot

Odd Fellow’s Rest

A Rose by Any Other Name

The jack-o-lantern daystar was being swallowed by the quicksand horizon when we arrived in the Mexican mountaintop city, San Cristobál de Colón. My wife and I had hitchhiked and caught buses from the interior of Mexico to the West Coast and points in between. Although the rattletrap trucks and stopgap buses appeared unreliable, they safely transported us across treacherous terrain of winding roads fraught with sharp turns and steep embankments. Only yesterday, Deni and I had been in the lowlands visiting a quaint, but drowsy town and, as we stepped off the bus, it required a conscious effort to breathe the sparsely thin air of this relatively intense elevation. Energized by the feelings of change and wonder brought on by travel, and sensing pure exhilaration and vertigo coursing through my veins, I blurted, I can feel the unwritten lives inside my head.

Deni threw me a peculiar look. Myles, you sound like you need a good night’s sleep, she said.

That remark, like a pair of forceps, yanked me out of my womb-like cranium. Filled with an indefinite sense of Third World surrealism, I, a thirty-something-year-old balding, bearded Canadian, was more at home in a foreign country than my native land.

It was the Easter season in an overwhelmingly Catholic country where religion reigned. Deni and I unwittingly landed in San Cristobál during Holy Week and witnessed processions of the devout carrying their weighty, life-sized icons (the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, also Mary) through the streets to town square, all the while praying, wailing, chanting. They were followed by a host of guilt-ridden pilgrims, many moving forward on their bloodied knees, undergoing the catharsis offered by their religion in their place and time. As for time, it was no longer 1979. I felt we had been catapulted backwards, to an indeterminate era centuries earlier.

Deni and I viewed the parade from our hotel room balcony. It didn’t seem real to me or, it was so real it was unreal. I thought the scene to be reminiscent of a movie or, more likely, a montage of colorful yet inconsistent film footage. For some reason (maybe I’m fatalistic), the display of devotion reminded me of the scene in The Bridge Over San Luis Rey, where a seemingly indestructible centuries’ old bridge, the mythical footpath, collapsed and sent five humans plummeting to their deaths in the ravine below. The author then asked one of those nagging existential questions: Why those five? Really, I felt there were many people just like him here tonight with: Why? And to further complicate the matter, others like Deni (I assumed) and me with the flip side: Why not?

Speaking of why and why not, I realized I had to decide on self-interest (why not?) if I wanted to have Deni’s company tonight. I could see her pattern unfolding, the one that precluded why she would not want to go out: she was getting entangled in her art web. Sometimes it’s hard living with an artist, the way they become so detached and leave you dangling like a non-entity in their other worldly realm of detached subjectivity. Tonight she was characteristically removed, puzzling over some mementos and photographs, doing a little sketching, then arranging and rearranging this galaxy of movable parts as if she were the goddess of creation. I could tell she would be set for the night, like a child with a new toy if I didn’t intervene soon; my head was reeling with plans of its own, not unlike another child, the mischievous one.

Maybe we should go out and join the celebration.

Myles, you know I don’t like crowds. But if you want to go, that’s cool. She hummed those words in her sweetly sensual voice, with its trace of a Texas drawl. She curled her lips in a flirtatious way, and her eyes glowed with incandescent intensity. Her long, straight, auburn hair highlighted her symmetrical face and silky soft skin, as luminescent as mother of pearl.

I guess I tend to look for undercurrents and hidden meanings and I sensed that Deni would be happy to banish me from the room and bask in her creativity, alone in her universe.

Can I get you anything before I go? I asked, knowing that most artists respond to the benevolent dictator, one in a long line of self-imposed hazards.

Yes. Where’s the bottle of paregoric? And, many artists also respond to the elixir, another pitfall.

I didn’t take it with us, I lied. I threw it away when you got better.

There must be a drugstore nearby.

Are you sick again?

No, seeking inspiration.

That’s what it took to get her out - the prospect of a vial of opium. I triumphed in my manipulation, but as for Deni’s unquenchable thirst for a muse inside an elixir, I must admit I was worried. Anyway, my rambling thoughts aside, we were walking along the esplanade, or more like swaying, since we were swept up in the crowd when Deni spotted the sign Pharmacia on a storefront and said, Great, a drugstore. I was disappointed to move out of the crowd because now I was not so intimately close to her, no longer touching her cool, soft skin, smelling her scent. I guess I could have told her she was as essential to me as the air I breathed, but how do you tell someone that they are your personal addiction? She knew I adored her. Wasn’t I already standing naked?

We entered the drug emporium and approached the young man in the white lab coat, presumably the pharmacist, (one had to assume a lot things, rightly or wrongly for one’s own peace of mind, under foreign circumstances in 1979).

"Necesito valium," I said, strictly relying on my limited high school Spanish vocabulary to acquire valium.

"Dos, cinco o diez milegramos?" The young man nonchalantly inquired.

"Diez, ten," I responded, going for the most potent, amazed at the handy return gained from my investment in four years of high school Spanish. Then, I added some garbled Spanish to the effect that my wife was sick with so-called Montezuma’s revenge and we also needed paregoric. Deni hunched over melodramatically, as if in the grips of another attack. The youth handed me two bottles of paregoric and a pillbox of valium. I paid and we left, transaction completed.

Deni let out one of those deliciously feminine, feverish, somewhat feline, full-skirted laughs of delight.

Here, I said, handing her the vial after I opened it and took a swig.

She downed the rest and said, Here, here. Deni’s so young and malleable, I reflected.

Relaxing and floating, as if catching the perfect wave…riding, peaking and dissolving into the liquid moment, I became one with the crowd. Deni was apparently feeling the effects, too, for she became immersed in the procession and we followed it into church, as if by blind faith. Deni’s face was truly angelic and I sensed that she was viewing this scene as an artistic encounter, just as she perceived most situations as extensions of art, including our marriage.

It was High Mass: candles glowed while the paste-like scent of incense crept up my nostrils and the smoky shroud enveloped the physically devout ones heading to the altar on their knees. The priest was chanting in Spanish and this surprised me because I hadn’t attended church in decades and I recalled the ceremony in Latin, not the vernacular.

A star-struck gaze passed across Deni’s gray eyes. Was a new theology or doctrine taking shape inside her cranium? No, I quickly crossed that possibility off my list. Not that she wasn’t spiritual, but I surmised she wouldn’t find religion in a popular connotation. As usual, no matter what the outward circumstances, I was obsessed with Deni...thinking that perhaps she was at this very moment rationalizing her artwork as immaculate conceptions and relating and interrelating God and different levels of belief into a bizarre, internal impressionistic vision or, perhaps op art.

We passed the other bottle while kneeling in conformity. When we got out of church, I experienced a euphoric feeling, a kind of oneness, perhaps the oceanic feeling of Freud’s allusions. In fact, while feeling giddily euphoric, I fell head-first, full throttle, all the way down, dozens of stairs. Several people rushed over to see if I was a broken heap or still workable. They stood me up and Deni dusted me off. I had hoped my recovery wouldn’t be called un milagro, a miracle, with the season being what it was. Luckily, the crowd was satisfied to see me upright and, although I may have been thanking my saviors too enthusiastically as I chanted, "gracias, gracias," a young man stepped up and invited us to his family’s home, to convalesce over a pot of medicinal tea or a bottle of mescal, I wasn’t sure which.

He, Lance Amarado, lived in a comfortable adobe on the outskirts of town. It was a small household minus the middle generation, consisting of an aged grandmother, and the grandchildren – Lance, Pablo and Mara – twenty-four, twenty and nineteen, I soon learned, ubiquitous children of the baby boom years. Deni fell into their age range and I, suffice it to say, had a head start on them all, all except su abuela, their grandmother, who, in all probability, would cross the finish line well before the rest of us.

Abuela, a medicine woman by vocation, was sitting in a rocking chair, sucking on a lime when we dropped in. Lance told us before we reached their home that abuela was dying from stomach cancer and, although she was heavily medicated with morphine, she said she wanted to die sitting up, not one to take anything lying down. Abuela took no notice of us and my eyes quickly jumped from the grandmother to Lance’s younger sister, Mara, who leaned over the grand señora fluffing her pillows and tucking her blanket. Then, she went into the kitchen and returned with a smelly bowl of broth, one of the old gal’s medicinal recipes.

Mara had a dancer’s body and next to Rodin’s withering old lady, she was a glittering apparition. I found myself comparing Mara to Deni, really comparing, thinking she was as good looking as my wife. It was the first time in our year of marriage when I momentarily lusted for another woman. But Mara both resembled Deni and stood more exotic, with a mysterious aura that I had never experienced before. She had distinctive cheekbones, pouting yet flirtatious and inviting lips, opal eyes, olive complexion and chocolate brown hair.

They return to babies, Lance philosophically remarked, nodding at abuela.

Your English is flawless, I said, in a clumsy attempt at deportment.

I don’t speak much English outside these four walls. I don’t want my neighbors thinking I’m different, he said.

That struck me as a strangely adolescent sentiment, but then Lance did look misplaced and unusual enough. He was much taller than the average Mexican, had sandy blonde hair and European features, unlike Pablo and Mara who fit in better.

Deni was examining Pablo’s paper maché artwork. Pablo was pleased to show a fellow artist his animal collection, opening the double doors to a parlor that housed everything from an eagle to a wild turkey. The two paper sculptures that Deni admired most were a tiny, intricate rose and a bold life-sized and lifelike jaguar positioned in jungle grasses, ready to pounce.

Lance opened the pantry and took out a bottle of mescal, the drink familiarly known as tequila with the worm in it.

Do you do the lime bit? He asked.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do, I responded.

"I can’t stand those little buggers, I guess, because abuela, he said, motioning to the señora and playfully rolling his eyes, has used them on us for medicinal purposes since we were babies. If she was well and you had dysentery, the so-called Montezuma’s revenge that plagues tourists, she would advise you to eat raw garlic and drink lime juice. It’s been known to work, but look at her now, sucking on her lime, waiting for the grim reaper, living on superstition and herbal broth. Lance shook his head, clearing his eyes of a sandy lock, as if he were surprised by his own cynical words, then mumbling, it’s not so bad, one expects the old to die. By the way, if you talk to her, address her as Doña Rosa." Only we three can call her abuela.

On that note, Lance led the way outside, opened the bottle of mescal and handed it to me. I took a shot and handed it back. Lance bolted some down, then emitted a gasp of delight. We passed it again and again and somewhere in the nocturnal panorama, we got caught up in life stories. He told me of his parents, Evan and Ruth, who had been killed when their bus swerved off a cliff and down the Sierra Occidental into the Pacific Ocean. His father was once a well-known actor, a lost result of McCarthyism madness. After difficult years of vainly attempting to get another gig in Hollywood, with some small cache of his thespian earnings intact, he headed south of the border. There he met their mother, whose parents had fled another ism in Gestapo Germany, when she was but an infant. In a sense, Ruth had experienced her rites of passage before she could even walk or talk. She had served as her parents’ ticket across several delicate border crossings, carrying a cache of diamonds and other negotiable items her mother had meticulously sewn into her bonnets and booties. The family had settled in Panama first and later moved to Mexico. Abuela, he explained, was not their biological grandmother, but the long-standing housekeeper.

We were quiet for a while, except for the clinking bottle on the table as we went round after round. That’s a tragic story, I said.

But life is tragic and risky – truths most people refuse to acknowledge.

Not everyone bears burdens of mishaps. My own was quiet, really. My family’s rich and I’m privileged through no efforts of my own. I come from a sparse emotional landscape predicated on the rigors of routine and predictability. The good side to it is my independence. The flip side is that people often get jealous of me, born as I was, with the proverbial silver spoon in my mouth. It doesn’t feel good to be resented and prejudged. Then there’s my beautiful wife, maybe I’m rocking the cradle, I don’t know.

People are envied for their money whether they earn it or not. And men with beautiful wives are often begrudged their good fortune. We all have our demons to slay, philosophically speaking.

What demons? Do you refer to my lack of ambition, no steam of my own?

I don’t know you well enough to say, but it sounds as if you have a clue, Lance said.

Would you call lethargy a demon?

Any self-made rut is a demon, no?

I haven’t done anything with my life in the sense that people expect. But, then, maybe living is enough.

Lance and I sat on the Amarado’s front porch and fireworks from the town square lit up the background. Through the window I saw Deni, Mara and Pablo in half view, in the kitchen, laughing and talking in confidential tones. I could see they were drinking from mugs, perhaps it was coffee or tea.

I motioned to Deni and said, she’s my life.

Is it enough? Can she withstand the burden you’re placing on her?

Where does one find one’s happiness? I rhetorically asked.

My conversation with Lance rambled on and on into the aimless, narcissistic night and proved less and less insightful the more the mescal flowed; still, it was a drunken good time. The fireworks and the night became obliquely, darkly disquieting. I looked at the clock, already 2:30 a.m. Pablo must have moved abuela to her bed because the rocking chair was empty. As for Pablo, Mara and Deni, they had disappeared. At about 4:00 a.m., it occurred to me that I should be curious where the trio had gone. Lance told me that a truckload of psychedelic mushrooms had arrived from Oaxaca for the Easter weekend and he knew that Pablo, the artistic one, had acquired some for inspiration. He said that the three had probably taken their trip to a nearby cave, a favorite local spot for such activities. He suggested that we take a walk and try to communicate with them.

"Anyone who thinks boracheros, drunks such as us, are pathetic should first take a look in here," Lance said, in a tilted, sidewise tone, upon entering the cave. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking until I caught sight of them, crouched over, painting the cave walls like Neolithic creatures. Lance and I jeered like a couple of baboons. They looked at us with stark, raven glances. Had we frightened them? I kissed Deni, a drunken French kiss, thinking I would be reassuring her. She recoiled from my tongue as if it were a slithering snake. Pablo and Mara stared at us like the jaguar in the parlor, ready to pounce.

Let’s go, man. I don’t think they want us here, Lance said, and we laughed as we ran out of the crashed cave party, village idiots that we were.

We emerged into the shimmering silver-gray glow that separates night from day. A passing elderly man said, "Buena Madrugada." Lance and I returned