Running Free and Other Stories - Ken Byerly - Bog

Sometimes at night when the wind moves in the trees and the moon skips from cloud to cloud I get to thinking. Where now is Jennifer, or Eileen, or Christina? Why did I do that? Why didn't I do this instead? How could I have been so stupid? I remember faces, names, moods of moment. And maybe another story is born. Most of us remember defining moments in our own lives. That's what I tried to do in these ten stories. Go back. Examine. Wonder. There's regret here, and humor, ugliness, sex. There's the sheer joy of writing. I feel it. I want you to feel it too. "To write -- for me those two words justified everything," thinks 28-year old Larry wandering Europe in my story "A Friendly Game." This juggling of memories and present occurred also in my first volume of short stories, "Good Looking Bloke and Other Stories." But in this volume I think I cut closer to the bone. Hard things happen in "Heartless," "Teresa the Ennobler," and "The Broken Bow." Sex hovers, and plays its role. There's enthusiasm, the joy of adventure. In "So This Is New York," Dave Janssen, 24, on his first trip to Greenwich Village, walks into the San Remo bar on Bleecker Street after a long drive from Virginia. He sees a young man carrying three beers and a lemon. "Hey, you need all those beers?" somebody calls. "Don't speak to me," the young guy answers. "Speak to the lemon." Dave, rapt, feels he as ridden many miles and arrived at the right place. We visit Montana, Vermont, North Carolina, the beaches of the Hamptons. We wander Europe. I began "A Friendly Game" years ago in Paris. "So This Is New York" and "Mountain Music" graduate, with some changes, from my novel "Mountain Girl." I wrote the other seven stories between October, 2011 and August, 2012. Some gestated in memory or as "memos for future stories" for years. We'll see in these pages the Island of Ibiza, raw, before the jet airport and the crowds came. We'll visit the net-stockinged waitresses and coffee houses of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, play football in Montana, join a bridge gang on a railroad in Iowa. We'll walk tobacco fields with North Carolina tenant farmers and court a heartless young lady at Westhampton Beach. We'll hear a fundamentalist preacher troll for money and hike the Appalachian Trail. We'll meet, at a singles party, a young black woman with a cure for what ails a 31-year old divorced Midwesterner beginning a new career in New York. Life. Might we have lived it better? Or we might have done worse. Let's pull back the curtains and tussle with what we see. # # #