Synchronicity

By Barry Rachin

Gabe and Marie share a mutual disgust for the light-skinned Negro who never cleans up after her Great Dane at the Oak Knoll bird Sanctuary. For the lonely widower and lesbian thespian, their meeting is a textbook case of Jungian synchronicity, a serendipitous wink from the cosmos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Rachin
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781311535207

Barry Rachin

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Barry Rachin spent several years stationed in Yokuska, Japan as a Navy medic caring for casualties during the Vietnam War. He has studied at the University of Jerusalem, lived on a kibbutz for a year and holds a degree in clinical counseling from Simmons College. A self-taught woodworker, he presently lives in Attleboro, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters. 

Book preview

Haaaaah! Marie Brewster, let out a brief whimper like a mortally injured animal before slumping to the ground unconscious. When she came to, a rotund, bearded man with pebbly teeth and a bald spot on the back of his head was bent over the middle-aged woman fanning her with a fully-illustrated Kaufman’s Field Guide for Birds of North America.

Feeling better? The hairy man eased the woman to a sitting position with her back supported against a white birch. The unfortunate incident happened this way. Marie had gone for a stroll at the Oak Knoll bird sanctuary a mile down the road from where she was visiting with her brother's family in Brandenburg. Meandering down the rock-strewn trail to an open area fronting on a lake peppered with patches of pastel-colored algae, Marie was admiring a chokeberry bush ripe with crimson fruit. Suddenly, a man's voice, gruff and menacing, called out, Don't move! The woman, who under the best of circumstances suffered from a myriad of insecurities, felt every molecule of breath crushed from her lungs as her legs turned rubbery and mind went blank.

A Baltimore oriole, the man sputtered, was perched on a branch no more than ten feet from where you were standing, and I was trying to focus my birding binoculars for a better view.

A Lhasa apso that scampered into the brush when the woman collapsed returned. Nestling in her lap the manicy pooch with the