He sleeps loud enough to wake the dead. That’s what she thought. Space being short, she wrote: Snores. Crossing one denim-clad knee over the other, she considered going back to bed, all the same. Maybe she could dream something so wonderful it would banish the nightmare that had chased her out here to the kitchen too early on an autumn Saturday.
Even as his brother’s HDTV boomed from the basement, Darren Wang felt alone. His own room was modest: a bed, a computer, a shelf full of books. Since high school, he dreamed of breaking in as a crime writer but had more success with poetry. His brother David, meanwhile, made $140 an hour as a computer programmer, which was the reason Darren had a place to live while “honing his craft.”
Just an FYI, the computer I typically use for Shred stuff—reading and editing stories, yes/no/maybe, upcoming schedule, payment tracking, etc.—has given up to ghost. The data may be recoverable, which would be convenient and save me a bit of time; if not, I’ll just spend some time digging through other records to recreate the missing info. Bobbles will, hopefully, be limited and not extend past this week.
Gecko sat in a booth at the back of a club on the Sunset Strip, nursing a beer and trying to tell himself that things were not so bad. They weren’t, not really, at least when compared to his life before Los Angeles. Even that life had not been so bad. Sure, he had had to try to finding bars and halls in Iowa that would let him and his band Hydrahead play for a measly two hundred dollars a night. Life had been hard, but fun. Now he had a huge house, a wife with plastic surgery habit, and Hydrahead was steadily putting out albums on a major label.