DeeBooks Publishing, LLC, New York and Delaware
Copyright ©1998 and Copyright ©2012 by A. Yamina Collins
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-615-65751-6
Book cover design by Rebecca Swift
This is a work of fiction. All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, either dead or living, is purely coincidental.
To obtain permission to excerpt portions of the text, please contact the author at yamina@yaminatoday.com.
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To Mommy, Devorice Jean Collins (1944-2010)
Thank you for always believing in me . . . with eternal love and hope of seeing you again at the Resurrection, Yamina
The Dream
I'd like to plant a garden, see?
Where humpback whales meet human flesh
Then dive inside the mouths of sharks
And mock the watery, tortured corpse
Where babies cry, all plump and brown
In naked stumps of oak wood bark
While Mrs. Strumler calls to me
"I saw your mother in the clouds!"
And as for Casper's peeling skin
And as for suns that skip the East
These garden-fingered lullabies
They pound their chests at Heaven's feet
I'd like this garden fresh and rosy
Green and pink and sinewy
The smell of dew grass, wet and blue
The honeysuckle's dying hue
This dream I have will weep and churn
I'll pray and drink the bloodied wine
Then gnash and tear and stroke the Beast
And turn-unmoving-in my sleep
The Disillusioned
Ladies, you hold onto ideas too much. Honestly, you overfantasize about everything to do with domestic bliss, and obviously I'm talking about men.
Take this girl Melly Sturgess I know (not her real name). She's still holding onto a loveless marriage with a man who both beats her and has another woman on the side. I don't understand it. And I tell her this all the time, too. I say, "Melly, girl, I just don't understand it."
But all she can do is hold her head down and groan; then she'll burst into tears and tell me to shut up and leave her alone-like she did two weeks ago over the phone!
She's friends with my editor, see, and I guarantee you that if we hadn't met while palling around in the same circles I'd never have become acquainted with someone like her. To put it in plain English, she's a romantic idiot, a love-soaked carpet men get to walk all over, and I just don't have a whole lot of tolerance for people like that.
Then again, most women fall into the romantic idiot category, and as the author of several relationship books, I know this to be a fact-but I still get tired of the nonsense. Ladies, it's time to grow up and grow smart.
YOU ARE READING
The Disillusioned
Short StoryA relationship guru learns first hand that first loves aren't so easy to forget... from author A. Yamina Collins' dynamic new fiction collection, "The Blueberry Miller Files"