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Although I enjoy living above this particular two-car garage, and though I findan exclusive photo layout If one of their glamour scouts saw my place, he’d probably note, with disdain, that the second word in the estion

The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display pro Blue Hawaii, here I’d left it Occasionally, it ht

I showered with peach-scented soap and peach shaiven to me by Stormy Llewellyn Her real first name is Bronwen, but she thinks that makes her sound like an elf

My real name actually is Odd

According to my mother, this is an uncorrected birth-certificate error Sometimes she says they intended to name me Todd Other times she says it was Dobb, after a Czechoslovakian uncle

My father insists that they always intended to nah he won’t tell me why He notes that I don’t have a Czechoslovakian uncle

My h she refuses to explain why I’ve never met either him or her sister, Cymry, to whom he is supposedly married

Although es the existence of Cymry, he is adamant that she has never married He says that she is a freak, but what he means by this I don’t know, for he will say no more

My estion that her sister is any kind of freak She calls Cyift from God but otherwise remains uncommunicative on the subject

I find it easier to live with the nah to realize that it was an unusual narown comfortable with it

Stormy Llewellyn and I are more than friends We believe that we are soul mates

For one thing, we have a card fro ether forever

We also havebirthmarks

Cards and birthmarks aside, I love her intensely I would throw h cliff for her if she asked me to ju behind her request

Fortunately for htly She expects nothing of others that she herself would not do In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship

She once brooded for an entire day about whether to keep fifty cents that she found in the change-return slot of a pay phone At last she mailed it to the telephone company

Returning to the cliff for a moment, I don’t mean to io out on a date with him

S like a peach, as Stor eaten a blueberrycare of business” in a lousy imitation of his voice, I set off for work at the Pico Mundo Grille

Although the dawn had just broken, it had already flash-fried into a hard yellow yolk on the eastern horizon

The town of Pico Mundo is in that part of southern California where you can never forget that in spite of all the water imported by the state aqueduct system, the true condition of the territory is desert In March we bake In August, which this e broil

The ocean lay so far to the west that it was no more real to us than the Sea of Tranquility, that vast dark plain on the face of the moon

Occasionally, when excavating for a new subdivision of tract homes on the outskirts of town, developers had struck rich veins of seashells in their deeper diggings Once upon an ancient age, waves lapped these shores

If you put one of those shells to your ear, you will not hear the surf breaking but only a dry ins

At the foot of the exterior steps that led down from my small apartment, in the early sun, Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse

Ordinarily, Penny had none of that preadolescent despair to which some kids prove so susceptible these days She was an ebullient twelve-year-old, outgoing and quick to laugh

This , however, she looked solee of a cloud

I glanced toward the house, fifty feet ahereme at any ht The sight of herself in a mirror was never sufficient to put her fear to rest

Without a word, Penny turned away from the stairs She walked toward the front of the property

Like a pair of loo sunshine and their own silhouettes, two enorold and purple, which they flung across the driveway

Penny appeared to shih this intricate lace of light an

d shade A black mantilla of shadow diing as she moved

Afraid of losing her, I hurried down the last of the steps and followed the girl Mrs Sanchez would have to wait, and worry

Penny led me past the house, off the driveway, to a birdbath on the front lawn Around the base of the pedestal that supported the basin, Rosalia Sanchez had arranged a collection of dozens of the seashells, all shapes and sizes, that had been scooped from the hills of Pico Mundo

Penny stooped, selected a specie, stood once more, and held it out to me

The architecture reseh exterior was brown and white, the polished interior shone pearly pink

Cupping her right hand as though she still held the shell, Penny brought it to her ear She cocked her head to listen, thus indicating what she wanted me to do

When I put the shell to my ear, I did not hear the sea Neither did I hear the melancholy desert wind that I mentioned previously

Instead, froent rhythrunt of mad desire

Here in the summer desert, winter found my blood

When she saw from my expression that I had heard what she wished me to hear, Penny crossed the lawn to the public sidewalk She stood at the curb, gazing toward the west end of Marigold Lane

I dropped the shell, went to her side, and waited with her

Evil was co

Old Indian laurels line this street Their great gnarled surface roots have in places cracked and buckled the concrete ay

Not a whisper of airlay as uncannily still as dawn on Judgment Day one breath before the sky would crack open

Like Mrs Sanchez’s place, hborhood are Victorian in style, with varying degrees of gingerbread When Pico Mundo was founded, in 1900, rants from the East Coast, and they preferred architectures better suited to that distant colder, damper shore

Perhaps they thought they could bring to this valley only those things they loved, leaving behind all ugliness

We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage hich it must travel In spite of our best intentions, ays find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness, and misery