The Feet of God

1 - ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE

My conscious awareness returned, little by little revealing a world to me like velvet curtains parting at The Fancy Pants Arcade back in Bakersfield.  Only I wasn’t about to be entertained by exotic dancers or lap dancing chorines.  No, things was a lot worse.  I awoke to find myself bruised and battered along an unfamiliar shore.  Waves lapped against my nether regions still caught up by the ocean’s edge.  I wiped off the wet sand caking my eyes and squinted into the bright white light of the morning sun.  Listening to the surf’s soothing roar, I knew I was fuck’n lucky to be alive.

Above my waist saltwater and sweat trickled off, while below the belt seaweed clung to me like something unholy and intent on dragging me back into the deep.  With great effort and a loud grunt I finally managed to roll to my side and prop myself up.  Spitting sand from my lips, blowing sand out my nose and shaking sand from my hair, I slowly crawled my way up the beach.  And as I struggled to go forward, I thought to myself, How in the hell did I end up in this pernicious paradise?

Then I remembered a long road trip depositing me at a bar called The Rusty Trumpet on a flyspeck island cove named Punta Gordita.  My cross-country travels started after my old home in Broken Heart Park went dry for me, what wasn’t vaporized by explosions or other horrific forms of ruination.  I lost my job, my lady, my rent-free trailer, hell, I even re-lost my long-lost little half-sister.  The family fortune I inherited in stocks went tits up, and my friends who hadn’t been shot dead or run over by a train or blowed up or impaled with lawn ornamentation seemed to just fade away.  But that’s another story.

With no home to call my own or hold me back, I was trying to find me a new beginning in the Florida Keys, while searching for Baby Harmonica, my little half-sister, my only next-of-kin, who’d mysteriously vanished back in Bakersfield and hasn’t been seen since.

So begun this trip deep into my broken heart.

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