Randy at Home

By Corey Mesler

Ringo’s singing “Act Naturally.”  The tea kettle is so close to screaming that time stands still.  Randy is motionless in the middle of his crappy apartment staring at a TV  with the sound turned off.  There’s a woman on the screen in a bikini and a bunch of college jock types standing around her, ogling.  Randy feels like an alien on his own planet, the planet Earth.  Suddenly he hears the music, The Beatles.  And just as suddenly the water temperature reaches a musical crescendo.  Life is all around.  Randy shudders like a wet dog.  Sometimes you lose your place and sometimes you pop right back in.

 

About the Author
Corey Mesler has been a book reviewer for numerous papers for over ten years and for much longer than that he has been fumbling in a greasy till, selling Philip Roth and Iris Murdoch and Richard Powers and Steve Stern to the great unwashed who come to him from fourteen surrounding counties, asking “what is there to read?,” such is his reputation. He has published work in Yellow Silk, Black Dirt, Blue Unicorn and Green Egg, and that’s just the colors. His first novel, Talk, appeared in 2002, and a chapbook of poems, Chin-Chin in Eden, in 2003. He is the husband of the world’s most patient woman, and a damn fine bookseller in her own right, and the father of two children, whose talents have so far surpassed their father’s he can only shake his hoary head and mutter.


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