The Missing Tooth

Little bit of street art from Glassboro NJ. Don’t know who did it, or why they did it, or even how they did it, but it seems fun.

Chapter One.
My name is Dimitri, I have just turned sixteen, and up until now my only claim to fame is that I have been dumped nine times since I turned fifteen. Right now I’m sitting sideways on the bed with my current girlfriend, Fable, while she’s writing an essay on the poet Pablo Neruda.
Fable and me met on swim team. She gave me butterflies as soon as I saw her, but I dived right in. At first I was swimming against the tide. I tried every stroke I knew, and eventually she did a flip turn and now we’ve been swimming laps in the same lane for three months, which is kind of a record for me.
I never stop thinking about how lucky I am to finally have met a girl who likes me and wants to stay with me. Not only that. I actually think I’m quite lucky to have been dumped by those other nine girls, because if they hadn’t dumped me I would never have met Fable. She is everything I could ever want in a girl. She’s as tall as I am. She’s tanned, but with clear skin, and she has a dirty blonde hair that comes down to her shoulders, although right now she has it tied up in a kind of clump on top of her head.
She’s smart too. She’s actually writing the essay on Neruda in Spanish.
There’s a thud from downstairs. The sound of Fable’s mom and dad closing the front door. They’re heading off to the gym, and will be gone for at least a couple of hours, while they work on their respective anatomies. Talking of anatomy, I really have a thing about girls’ necks and collarbones, and Fable has really nice sternomastoids which are the long muscles that run from behind the ears and attach to the collar bones.
I lean sideways to plant a kiss on the sternomastoid nearest to me, but Fable shuffles away. It could be that, just by chance she just moved away from me for some unrelated reason at precisely the moment I leaned over to kiss her. So I try it again. I aim at the sternomastoid, pucker my lips, and kiss the empty space between us.
Now it’s my turn to shuffle back.
“If you move any further away from me you’ll fall off the bed,” I tell her.
“Come on, Dimitri,” she says, tapping her pen on her comp book. “My parents are still here.” She shrugs. We never smooch when her parents are here.
“They went out,” I say. “I heard the door.”
“But––”
“Then I heard the car,” I say.
She bites her lower lip and nods her head. “Okay,” she says. She closes her comp book with the pen still in it, and places it on the night stand, then she reaches up to the collar of her shirt.
My heart pounds. Her top two buttons are undone, and now she’s going to do the rest. She’s going to undo her shirt. But she doesn’t undo any buttons. In fact she fastens the second one, so now she only has one button undone.
What is going on!?
Next, she reaches into the drawer of her night stand and pulls out a second comp book.
“What do you want me to do?” I say. “Write you a poem in style of Pablo Whatsit?”
“No. No poetry.” She opens the comp book and turns to a blank page. It’s an un-lined comp book. “I want you to do a drawing.”
“Okay,” I say. I take the book, scoot down to the other end of the bed, then sit cross-legged so I’m facing her. “Relax and sit still,” I say. I hold up the pen and squint at her like I’m a real artist.
“No. Not a portrait,” she says. “It’s a kind of game.” She give me a quick grin, then crosses her own legs yoga-style, with her foot on top of her knee. “It’s a landscape.” She leans forward and taps her finger on the page of the comp book. “I want you to draw a house, a lake, some trees, and a snake.”
“Wow. That rhymes,” I say. “You’re a poet and you don’t know it.”
“Just do the drawing,” she says. When did she become so immune to my charms?
“Right.” I scribble in the corner of the page to get the ink flowing. “A snake, right?”
“Right,” she says.
The snake is the most fun of the objects I’m supposed to depict, so I draw a mighty anaconda right across the bottom of the page, with long, curving strokes of the pen. Just for good measure I give it boggly eyes, and a drooping forked tongue. After that I add a little cuteness to my illustration in the form of a dainty cottage with a couple of tiny windows. Then I draw a pond that’s about the size of the anaconda’s head, and finally I sketch out a weeping willow, that’s reflected in my pond. “There you go,” I say. “Did I remember everything?”
“Yup.” Fable looks at the picture, nods, then turns it back around so it’s the right way up for me.
“So what’s my score?” I say.
She ignores me and points at the snake. “You see this, Dimitri?”
“I’m quite proud of that sucker,” I say.
“Yes. Well the snake represents how much interest you have in sex,” she says. “I have to say, I’ve tried this test on quite a few people, and I’ve never seen one this big before.”
“Quite a lot of girls tell me that,” I say.
“That’s disgusting,” she says. “The snake represents how important sex is to you. It has nothing to do with size, which in your case is average at best.”
Fable is acting really odd today. I’ve good mind to just go home. “In your extensive experience,” I say, although I say it a little too late for it to really be effective.
I think she’s going to have a fit, but she gives me an enigmatic look, that kind of says shut up, and taps her finger on the house. “The house represents how you see yourself. The size and number of windows reveal how open you are.”
“I was going to make them bigger,” I say.
“Well, it looks like you’re pretty secretive,” she says. She slides her finger across the page to the lake. The lake represents your capacity for love. A little round pond like this means that you’re closed off, and not very loving.”
“I am very romantic,” I say.
“Romantic is not the same thing.” Finally she points at the tree. “The trees represent your friendships. I’ve never seen anyone draw only one tree. Most people do at least a dozen, and this is a little stunted tree. It doesn’t say much for your concern for your friends.”
“There’s a reflection,” I say.
“That might be even worse,” she says. “It might mean that your only friend is yourself.”
This last comment actually stings a little, but I don’t want to show it. After all it’s only a game.
“Can I do it again, now?” I say.
“No,” she says. “There’s no point now you know what it means.”
“So, have you done the test yourself?” I say.
“Of course,” she says. “Give me the pen.” She takes the pen, folds over a new page and begins to draw, and as she draws she gives a commentary. “I drew a huge house, with lots of big windows.” She sketches out a palace. “My lake was like this.” She draws a beach right in front of the house.
“But that isn’t even a lake,” I tell her. “It’s the ocean.”
“No, it’s a lake,” she says. “Just a big one. Like Lake Ontario.” She draws some distant hills to indicate the opposite shore.
“What about the tree?” I say.
“Just give me a second,” she says. She sketches out a giant pine forest behind the house that extends right across the page and disappears into the distance on her little lake shore.
“Nice,” I say. “So what did you do for the snake?”
“Well, that’s what I’m coming to,” she says. “I drew a teeny, tiny snake.” She draws a single “W” shaped pen line about half an inch long, right next to the house.
I blow out a long ragged breath. “So what do you get from this?”
“Dimitri,” she says. “We’re about as different from one another as any two people could possibly be.”
“Opposites attract,” I say.
“Well, not when you’re as opposite as this,” she says. “I mean, the main focus of your existence is sex, but for me it’s almost irrelevant in my life.”
“Fable,” I say. “Opposite is not quantifiable.”
She frowns at me. “What?”
“You’re either opposite,” I say, “or you’re not opposite. We can’t be more or less opposite.” Now the words are out of my mouth I’m not sure I’m right about this, but Fable is still frowning at me, so I decide to push the point further. “It’s like six is opposite twelve, but four and five are not opposite.” Now I’ve begun I’m not sure where to go with this.
“What has this got to do with you and me?” Fable forces a brave smile over the top of her frown, as if she’s comforting a deeply disturbed lunatic.
She has a point. I rest my case.
“Look at my lake. I have a huge capacity for love. You have almost none.” She runs her finger along the shore of her lake. “Compare our houses. Mine is all lit up. I’m a bright, fun, easy-going person. Look at your sad little cottage, and then look at my friends.” She gives me a brave smile. “My trees are huge, and there are lots of them. My friendships are really important to me.”
“Can I see?” I say. I hold out my hand, and she gives me the book. I look flip the pages and look from one drawing to the other. “Ha! We must be the most ill-matched couple, ever.”
Fable unfolds her legs, brings her knees up, and rests her chin on them. “Well, Dimitri,” she says. “That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”

Working on final proofs of my next novel.

The text contains two elements that (I think) should be italicized.

The names of fictional pop groups, Titles of real (not fictitious) pop songs.

The reference I’ve looked at indicates that album titles should be italicized, but gives no guidance as to whether song titles should be.

The same reference sources tend to suggest that band names like ‘The Beatles’ and ‘White Stripes’ should not be italicized, but what about fictional bands?

Ultimately, can it just be a matter of taste?

I’m not completely sure if this is a first for me, but I have no memory of ever having stayed in a hotel right on a beach before.
Is it really a stone’s throw?
I think so. Given the right stone, which would be smooth, aerodynamic, and about the weight of a small apple, I believe that even with my lame throwing abilities I could pitch a rock from my hotel window, all the way to the high-tide mark.
Along with going for a dip at sunrise and going for a stroll along the sand at sunset, one of the delights of staying a stone’s throw from the beach is falling asleep at night listening to the steady rhythm of the surf.
Of course we are not the only ones staying here at the beach.
Last night I was dragged from sleep at around 2AM by the whoops of drunken men. A few moments later the steady thump of surf on sand was enhanced by the thump of disco music.
I stared at the ceiling of my hotel room until about 4AM, when I finally found the energy to get up, close the windows, and switch on the air-conditioning.
I had thought about wandering over to see what the whooping was all about, but I decided against it. Disco music is all about hooking up. Any bloke who is still going “Woo-hoo!” and “Yaah!” at 4 AM on a Monday morning has clearly not managed to hook up with anyone, and it was definitely fear that kept me in my room.
It wasn’t so much the fear that the whooping men would be violent or abusive towards me. It was the terror that they would somehow remind me of myself as a younger and more disillusioned man.

So we’re on this island called Culebra that sits in the turquoise ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico. It’s a nice place to stay but technically we’re not really here for fun. My mother- in-law, who lives here, has recently been very sick, and we’re here to visit her.
I haven’t even been married for a year yet, and I had been expecting a few years of getting to know the dynamics of my wife’s family before the specter of death reared its ugly head.
What makes matters worse is that my wife lost her father at a relatively young age, and with my last birthday a couple of weeks back I have just achieved the age at which my would be (or should have been) father-in-law passed away.
This alignment of life’s calendar has resulted in some extra responsibilities for me.
Yesterday I went snorkeling. There ought to be a better expression than ‘snorkeling’ for the almost magical activity of floating along the ocean’s surface while gazing down into a giant-sized aquarium, but for now ‘snorkeling’ will have to do.
Anyway, while snorkeling I came across an especially clear stretch of ocean, and ended up swimming in circles around one hand-shaped piece of coral while I followed a group of electric blue fish.
I must have been doing this for longer than I realized. Eventually I poked my head above the surface and looked back towards the beach. A tiny figure appeared to be doing jumping-jacks at the shore line. I pushed up my mask, rubbed my eyes and realized it was my wife, and she wasn’t doing jumping jacks, she was signaling me to come back.
I aimed myself towards her with my fastest stroke, which isn’t terribly fast, and a couple of minutes later I was sitting in the shallow water, pulling off my fins.
“Where have you been,” cried my wife. “You’ve been out for two hours. I thought you’d drowned!”
Superstition being what it is, I have to put my best effort in to appearing to be a live for the next twelve months.

1: “Run in” your car for the first 1000 miles.
2: Persuade your parents to stop referring to your radio as “the wireless.” if you still have a radio.
3: Wait for the television to warm up…if you still have a television.
4: Scrutinize a new-found friend’s LP collection while he/she makes you coffee.
5: Buy ashtrays.
6: Wander round the house putting LPs back in their sleeves, the morning after a party.
7: Refrain from ridiculing cigar-smokers.
8: Replace the stylus.
9: Use a ballpoint pen to rewind your Hawkwind cassette.
10: Explain what an illustrator does for a living with The Ramones playing at 80 decibels in the background.