<span style="font-style:italic;">Inconspicuously woven within the deep fabric of the great divide, the expanse that reaches beyond all borders, there is an intricately spun beacon of light; an ominous flicker in the heart of dark shadows . . . </span>

The pictures hanging proudly in the Grand Shores Community Art Gallery seemed to taunt him with zealous proclivity as he aimlessly ambled through room after room trying to process the news. "Pregnant?" he mumbled trying to convince himself it wasn't true. The half pint of gin he had hastily consumed in the parking lot began to coalesce with the pot smoked earlier that day. A slight wave of displacement washed over him making it hard for him to focus on the bronze plaques next to the correlating artwork. The oil-based murals and aqueous mosaics fused in bright, Brazilian colors filtered through his peripheral. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

"You can't smoke in here," a robotic voice admonished.

"I wasn't going to light it," he snapped spinning around to meet his faceless accuser.

"You can't smoke in here, son."

"What the hell is this, Big Brother?" he protested sticking the cigarette behind his ear. "Fuck it."

He staggered through the open glass doors separating the cubist works from the Impressionist exhibit. The selected paintings of Claude Monet were currently on display as the museum's main attraction for the month. In the corner of the room, a thermostat sat nervously monitoring the atmospheric temperature of the air like a cultural electrocardiogram, ready to discover abnormal drops in pressure at a moment's notice.

He had never been much of an art lover, though he once took a summer course on Ancient Egyptian art at the local community college. The class fulfilled a general education requirement for school. It must have been during the summer because he was home from college and recalled wanting to get a class or two out of the way before he returned east for the fall semester. He couldn't remember the exact grade he received for the course, though he recalled just passing.

He paused in front of Monet's "Le Pont d'Argenteuil" trying to recapture the girl's name he sat next to in that class. God, it seemed so long ago. Had it been three years already? The class had taken a study tour to the Art Museum in Chicago that summer.

He had snuck back onto the bus with her to fool around, while inside the museum the other students were being lectured on the underestimation of Van Gogh during his lifetime. She confessed that the only reason she had attended the trip was because she didn't have anything else to do that Saturday afternoon. Her beautiful auburn hair fell carelessly into her inviting, emerald eyes. It came to rest just below her shoulders covering the tiny freckles speckled across her fair-skinned chest. He reminisced about the way she giggled as she undressed on the back of the bus in broad daylight. The people walking by didn't seem to notice her naked body pressed against his, writhing with teenage lust before kneeling in front of him to majestically deliver the most memorable blow job ever received in the history of mankind. God, what was her name? BJ queen of the century, that's for sure. Beth . . . Becky? "Fuck it."

Outside the gallery, the sun was beginning to descend shooting azure stripes of calm mirage over the mauve print western sky. Shadows began to sprawl across the concrete as he gazed beyond the parking lot toward the shore of Lake Michigan. The hillocks of sugar sand seemed to stretch from one end of the horizon to the other providing refuge for the children's laughter that could be heard distantly splashing in the early summer surf.

West Michigan was perfect this time of the year. Pristine beaches and the clean air of a small, Midwest town made Grand Shores a premiere tourist spot. Visitors enjoyed the rows of harbored ships and quaint shops along the town's remarkably unsullied coastline. Emporiums specializing in homemade fudge offered free samples to passing pedestrians while a century old cinema house played silent, vaudeville movies accompanied by a live orchestra. The town used these attractions to accentuate a more "congenial" reputation needed in order to attract the budding tourism industry.

The kind of reputation a city needs to boast in order to convey the spirit of an All-American town; an essential reputation for a city who depended on tourist expenditure to hold it over during the cold, cruel winter months when the city folded up like a ghost town. The kind of reputation needed in a state where unemployment had been on the rise since the Bush administration's "War on Terror" had been initiated. The kind of reputation needed in a state whose largest city had been named Most Dangerous City in the nation for the third year in a row. The kind of reputation needed to create the illusion of communal pride, of a town committed to the growth and development of the nuclear family.