The prom was off to a bad start, thought Dennis. His sweaty palms were making a mess of his pristine uniform, and a hush had fallen over the gym as soon as he walked in, leaving only the sound of Dennis’s labored breathing and the angsty crooning of the Kings of Leon. He quickly realized that he must have misheard his friend Bacon, who had told him the theme of the prom was “Tarts and Hitlers.”

I fell three feet and into a puddle of grape-flavored Juicy Juice. Not too much juice, it was probably just from one carton. But this was no ordinary puddle; there was something different about it. I knew that because it told me. “Hey you! I’m no ordinary puddle!” it said.

It was the same old conundrum: how to build what he saw in his mind’s eye, how to raise a thing of beauty from the earth so that people would look at it and marvel for a century to come, without first raising the money to see it to fruition. Money. It was always a question of money. He’d borrowed from Sullivan to buy the lot for the Oak Park place all those years ago, and while he couldn’t very well sell it out from under Catherine, he’d already hit on the expedient of remodeling the place so she could rent out half of it and at least have a reliable income. He would provide for her and the children too, that was his responsibility and he would meet it—no one could say he was neglectful there, though they might whip him over Mamah all they wanted, pinching their noses and crossing the street to avoid him as if he were a leper. And he’d just have to find a means of raising money, not only for the remodeling, but for the new house that was already taking shape in his dreams and his waking hours too, a place away from all this confusion, a place where he could live and work in peace till it all blew over.

Read Part I at ForthMagazine.com/Charlie-Thomas

Not involving himself in the mess of reporters frothing over Tony Growen upon his release from the hospital—a local miracle by any standards—Chester Goldsmith focused rather on the young man standing next to the newly awakened coma patient. Seventeen-year-old Tony stood now in front of cameras and questions, bright-eyed and freshly recovered from his head injury, while his friend Daniel Rogers was quietly ushered to the outskirts of the frenzy by a woman in large sunglasses, pulling the teenager by the hand. Chester squinted from a distance, trying to make out the face of the woman. Ah yes, he smiled. That was her indeed—Daniel’s mother, Bobbi, to whom Chester hadn’t spoken in several years, not since the release of his book on Daniel…the Wonderchild. While the ignorant local press affiliates drooled over their supposed miracle boy, Chester slipped back into his car and carefully followed Daniel and his mother away from the scene.

Her nervous toes danced under the table. She thought- on this dismal day in South West London- the time had come to confess her state of tangled affairs. She could, given the spotlight for long enough, call attention to quite a few issues plaguing the Longley family dynamic. But instead, she thought it best to focus solely on the whole-bodied emotional affair she had been having with her parents’ neighbors’ 33 year-old son, Kingsley Stone, whom she had met three years prior at an equally dismal Christmas dinner. The families had come together in their typically matte fashion, and her husband Bill had his shirt ironed crisp and wore a smile only she could forget.