But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through with moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. She appeared to be ready to give birth in about a month, but she claimed that she had been pregnant for a long time and insisted that she would be pregnant longer still.Īlthough she said many things that I failed to understand, I believed that she always spoke the truth. The front porch faced the sea, and yellow bougainvillea cascaded across half the roof.Īnnamaria, whom I had known only since late January, occupied one of the bedrooms. I learn by going where I have to go.Ĭurrently I rented a quaint, furnished three-bedroom cottage in a quiet coastal town a couple of hundred miles from Pico Mundo. In the nineteen months since that day of death, I have traveled in search of the meaning of my life. Living is the price I pay for failing her, a high price that must be paid every morning that I wake. Stormy Llewellyn, the girl I loved more than life itself, was one of those who died that day. They say that I saved a lot of people in my hometown. Nineteen months ago, when I was twenty, I should have been riddled with bullets in that big-news shopping-mall shoot-out in Pico Mundo, a desert town in California. And I am no longer surprised that I am drawn to trouble as reliably as iron to a magnet. From that encounter, the day grew uglier as surely as the sun moved from east to west. 45 pistol and a desire to commit a few murders. Later that morning in early March, when I walked downtown to buy blue jeans and a few pairs of socks, I met a guy who had a. I waited and wondered until dawn crept down the sky and across the bedroom windows.

A third set of three rings followed, and then only silence. The vibrations that shivered through my bare chest seemed much too strong to have been produced by such a tiny clapper.

I was lying on my back in bed, utterly motionless, yet the bell rang three times again. BEFORE DAWN, I WOKE IN DARKNESS TO THE RINGING of a tiny bell, the thimble-size bell that I wore on a chain around my neck: three bursts of silvery sound, a brief silence after each.

Deeply odd